Think Like a Rocket Scientist

To mop the mist collected on your mental windshield in those areas and expose the invisible rules governing your life, spend a day questioning your assumptions. With each commitment, each presumption, each budget item, ask yourself, What if this weren’t true? Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this or replace it with something better?

The best way to expose invisible rules is to violate them. Go for a seeming moonshot you don’t think you’ll achieve. Ask for a raise you don’t think you deserve. Apply for a job you don’t think you’ll get.

“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,”

If you’re trying to transform an industry, it makes sense to look outside the industry for talent. That’s where you’ll find people who aren’t blinded by the invisible rules—the white tablecloths—that constrain their thinking.

When things are going well, we settle into the comfort of the status quo, rather than upending it.

Frazier asked them to do something they had never done before: destroy Merck. Frazier had the company executives play the role of Merck’s top competitors and generate ideas to put Merck out of business. They then reversed their roles, went back to being Merck employees, and devised strategies to avert these threats.

Lisa Bodell, the mastermind behind the exercise, explains, “To create the company of tomorrow, you must break down the bad habits, silos, and inhibitors that exist today.”

It’s one thing to say “let’s think outside the box.” It’s another to actually step outside the box and examine your company or product from the viewpoint of a competitor seeking to destroy it.

When ebooks began to threaten Amazon’s physical book business, Bezos embraced the challenge instead of turning away from it. He told one of his associates, “I want you to proceed as if your job is to put everyone selling books out of a job,” including Amazon itself. The business model this exercise produced eventually shot Amazon to the top of the ebook market.

You can employ variations of it in your own life by asking questions like the following: • Why might my boss pass me up for a promotion? • Why is this prospective employer justified in not hiring me? • Why are customers making the right decision by buying from our competitors?

really get into the shoes of the people who might reject your promotion, refuse to hire you, or buy from your competitors. Ask yourself, Why are they making that choice? It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s not because they’re wrong and you’re right. It’s because they see something that you’re missing.

Once you’ve got a good answer to these questions, switch perspectives and find ways to defend against these potential threats.

Legend has it that NASA spent a decade and millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that would work in zero gravity and function in extreme temperatures. The Soviets used a pencil. The story of the “write stuff ” is a myth.35 Pencil tips have a habit of breaking and getting into nooks and crannies—which may be okay on Earth, but not okay on a spacecraft, where they can find their way into mission-critical equipment or end up floating into an astronaut’s eyeball.

everything should be made “as simple and as few as possible.”36 This principle is known as Occam’s razor.

Carl Sagan put it well: “When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well,” you should “choose the simpler.”

Complicated things break more easily.

“Every decision we’ve made,” Musk says, “has been with consideration to simplicity.… If you’ve got fewer components, that’s fewer components to go wrong and fewer components to buy.”

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex,” economist E. F. Schumacher said in a quote often misattributed to Einstein. “It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

But don’t confuse simple with easy.

Michelangelo approached sculpting in the same way. As he explained, “The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous.”