Think Like a Rocket Scientist

“I worry that we are programming people to do the safe thing,” she told me. “But safe answers will never change the world.”

Often, our moonshots aren’t impossible enough. If people want to chuckle at your seeming naivete or call you unreasonable, wear it as a badge of honor.

Today’s laughingstock is tomorrow’s visionary. You’ll be the one laughing when you cross the finish line.

These ideas are cultivated by a multidisciplinary team of polymaths ideally situated for combinatory play. “The best ideas come from great teams,” Felten says, “not great men.”

“bad-idea brainstorm.” This might strike you as odd—why waste time with bad ideas?—but X is onto something. “You can’t get to the good ideas without spending a lot of time warming up your creativity with a bunch of bad ones,” Teller explains.67 “A terrible idea is often the cousin of a good idea, and a great one is the neighbor of that.”

These outdated details shouldn’t smother the overall vision. In other words, don’t stay the course just for the sake of staying the course.

Backcasting flips the script. Rather than forecasting the future, backcasting aims to determine how an imagined future can be attained

Humans are irrationally attached to their investments

Humans are irrationally attached to their investments. The more we invest time, effort, or money, the harder it becomes to change course.

To counter the sunk-cost fallacy, put the monkey first—tackle the hardest part of the moonshot up front.

In our lives, we spend our time doing what we know best—writing emails, attending endless meetings—instead of tackling the hardest part of a project.

What’s easy often isn’t important, and what’s important often isn’t easy.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”90

“The day before a major breakthrough, it is just a crazy idea,” says aerospace engineer Burt Rutan,

When we immediately launch into answer mode, we end up chasing the wrong problem.

When we’re familiar with a problem, and when we think we have the right answer, we stop seeing alternatives.

In our adult lives, problems often aren’t handed to us fully formed. We have to find, define, and redefine them ourselves.

“When you see a good move, don’t make it immediately. Look for a better one.”

Charles Darwin would agree. “Looking back,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them.”