Think Like a Rocket Scientist

You can also ask people who normally agree with you to disagree with you.

The voice of dissent could be anyone. You can ask yourself, “What would a rocket scientist do?” and imagine a rocket scientist, armed with the tools in this book, critically questioning your ideas.

Intel CEO Andy Grove used).60 In constructing a model of how an adversary thinks, you must be as objective and fair as possible. Avoid the instinct to caricature the opposing position, making it easier to debunk

“You’re not entitled to take a view,” he cautions, “unless and until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view.”

Most of our decisions in life are based not on tests, but on hunches and limited information.

We conduct tests—not to prove ourselves wrong, but to confirm what we believe is true.

In a well-designed test, outcomes can’t be predetermined. You must be willing to fail.

In a proper test, the goal isn’t to discover everything that can go right. Rather, the goal is to discover everything that can go wrong and to find the breaking point.

The best way to determine an object’s breaking point is to break it.

Testing can help turn unknowns into knowns.

All it takes is a willingness to design tests for the worst-case—rather than the best-case—scenario.

When you make a last-minute change to a product and ship it out the door without retesting the whole thing, you’re risking disaster.

“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

“The truth is that nothing went as we’d planned,” he responded, “but everything was within the scope of what we prepared for.”

“You don’t race on a treadmill with Netflix in front of you,” Boone says, “so you shouldn’t be doing your training like that.”

“Nice to see you again. Let’s dance.”

when it comes to reporting their own behavior, people tend to bend the truth.

instead of creating artificial testing environments disconnected from reality, we’re better off observing customer behavior in real life.

“If you want to improve a piece of software,” as IDEO’s founder David Kelley explains, “all you have to do is watch people using it and see when they grimace.”

Observing people, it turns out, tends to affect how they behave.