Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. Pursuing a moonshot puts you in a different league—and often an entirely different game—from that of your competitors, making the established plays and routines largely irrelevant.

the choice a lion faces in deciding to hunt for a mouse or an antelope. “A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse,” they explain. “But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself.” Antelopes, in contrast, are much bigger animals, so “they take more speed and strength to capture.” But once captured, an antelope can provide days of food for the lion.

Most of us go after the mice instead of the antelopes. We think the mouse is a sure thing, but the antelope is a moonshot. Mice are everywhere; antelopes are few and far between. What’s more, everyone around us is busy hunting mice. We assume that if we decide to go for antelopes, we might fail and go hungry

So we don’t launch a new business, because we think we don’t have what it takes. We hesitate to apply for a promotion, assuming that someone far more competent will get it. We don’t ask people on a date if they seem out of our league. We play not to lose instead of playing to win.

Musk’s selling point was that the engineers would “have the freedom to actually do their job—build a rocket—rather than sitting in daylong meetings, waiting months for a parts request to wend its way through a bureaucracy, or fending off internal political attacks

The hurdle to taking moonshots isn’t a financial or practical one. It’s a mental one.

The primary obstacles to moonshots are in your head, reinforced by decades of conditioning by society. We’ve been seduced into believing that flying lower is safer than flying higher, that coasting is better than soaring, and that small dreams are wiser than moonshots.

What you strive for becomes your ceiling.

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success,” says James Cameron, the filmmaker behind such blockbusters

There’s far less competition for antelopes. Everyone else is busy chasing mice in the same crowded, rapidly shrinking territory.

The story we choose to tell ourselves about our capabilities is just that: a choice. And like every other choice, we can change it. Until we push beyond our cognitive limits and stretch the boundaries of what we consider practical, we can’t discover the invisible rules that are holding us back.

Imagine a glass bottle with its base pointed toward a light. If you put half a dozen bees and flies into the bottle, which species would find its way out first?

The flies are the divergent thinkers, fluttering freely until they find the exit. The bees are the convergent thinkers, zeroing in on the seemingly most obvious exit path with a behavior that is ultimately their undoing.

Divergent thinking is a way of generating different ideas in an open-minded and free-flowing manner

The goal is to create a flurry of options—both good and bad—not prematurely judging them, limiting them, or choosing among them.

Einstein also explained, “is not a work for logical thought, even if the final product is bound in logical form.”

To activate divergent thinking, you must shut down the rational thinker in you, the part responsible for otherwise safe, beneficial grown-up behaviors. Set aside the spreadsheets, and let your brain run wild. Investigate the absurd. Reach beyond your grasp. Blur the line between fantasy and reality.

divergent thinking is a portal to creativity.

The “should” group zeroed in on the most obvious solutions—often not the best ones—but the “could” group stayed open-minded and generated a broader range of possible approaches.

“Convergent thinking alone is dangerous because you’re just relying on the past. What will succeed in the future may not resemble what succeeded in the past.”