Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable.

Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They’re moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs. They know that the rules aren’t set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged.

In the modern era, rocket-science thinking is a necessity. The world is evolving at dizzying speed, and we must continuously evolve with it to keep pace.

I aim to create an army of non–rocket scientists who approach everyday problems as a rocket scientist would. You’ll take ownership of your life. You’ll question assumptions, stereotypes, and established patterns of thinking. Where others see roadblocks, you’ll see opportunities to bend reality to your will. You’ll approach problems rationally and generate innovative solutions that redefine the status quo. You’ll come equipped with a tool kit that enables you to spot misinformation and pseudoscience. You’ll forge new paths and figure out ways to overcome the problems of our future.

Rocket science teaches us about our limited role in the cosmos and reminds us to be gentler and kinder to one another.

In the modern world, we look for certainty in uncertain places. We search for order in chaos, the right answer in ambiguity, and conviction in complexity.

In the modern world, we look for certainty in uncertain places. We search for order in chaos, the right answer in ambiguity, and conviction in complexity. “We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.”

If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected

Be careful if you spend your days finding right answers by following a straight path to the light switch. If the drugs you’re developing were certain to work, if your client were certain to be acquitted in court, or if your Mars rover were certain to land, your jobs wouldn’t exist.

Be careful if you spend your days finding right answers by following a straight path to the light switch. If the drugs you’re developing were certain to work, if your client were certain to be acquitted in court, or if your Mars rover were certain to land, your jobs wouldn’t exist. Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

The problem with the modern world, as Bertrand Russell put it, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

When we utter those three dreaded words—I don’t know—our ego deflates, our mind opens, and our ears perk up.

it’s far better to be uncomfortably uncertain than comfortably wrong.

Science, as George Bernard Shaw said, “can never solve one problem without raising 10 more problems.”

And like any good leader, he’s quick to take the blame but also share the credit.

uncertainty rarely produces a mushroom cloud. Uncertainty leads to joy, discovery, and the fulfillment of your full potential. Uncertainty means doing things no one has done before and discovering things that, for at least a brief moment, no other person has seen. Life offers more of itself when we treat uncertainty as a friend, not a foe.

If we explore only well-trodden paths, if we avoid games we don’t know how to play, we’ll remain stagnant. Only when you’re dancing in the dark, only when you don’t know where the light switch is—or even what a light switch is—can progress begin.

If we explore only well-trodden paths, if we avoid games we don’t know how to play, we’ll remain stagnant. Only when you’re dancing in the dark, only when you don’t know where the light switch is—or even what a light switch is—can progress begin. First chaos, then breakthrough. When the dance stops, so does progress.

Anomalies distort this clean picture of good and bad and right and wrong. Life is taxing enough without uncertainty, so we eliminate the uncertainty by ignoring the anomaly. We convince ourselves the anomaly must be an extreme outlier or a measurement error, so we pretend it doesn’t exist.

In Douglas Adams’s hilarious book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” After seven and a half million years of deep thought, it spits out a clear, but ultimately meaningless, answer: 42. Although the book’s fans have tried to ascribe some symbolic meaning to this number, I think there is none. Adams was simply mocking how humans crave and cling to certainty.