Think Like a Rocket Scientist

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?

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.”

current system that now powers our lives.5 Tesla built and tested inventions all in his mind. “Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally,” he explained. “I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop.”

Instead of making curiosity the norm, we wait until a crisis occurs to become curious. Only when we’re laid off do we begin to ponder alternative career paths. And only when our business is disrupted by a young, scrappy, and hungry competitor do we gather the troops to spend a few futile hours to “think outside the box.”

For answers, we rely on the same methods, the same brainstorming approaches, and the same stale neural pathways. It’s no wonder that the resulting innovations aren’t innovations at all.

geniuses don’t have a monopoly on thought experiments. There are no chosen few.

James March writes that “playfulness is a deliberate, temporary relaxation of rules in order to explore the possibilities of alternative rules.”

individuals and organizations “need ways of doing things for which they have no good reason. Not always. Not usually. But sometimes.” Only by taking a playful attitude toward our own beliefs can we challenge and change them. The operative

individuals and organizations “need ways of doing things for which they have no good reason. Not always. Not usually. But sometimes.” Only by taking a playful attitude toward our own beliefs can we challenge and change them.