Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They’re moved not by blind conviction but by self-

Companies fail because they stare at the rearview mirror and keep calling the same plays from the same playbook. Instead of risking failure, they stick with the status quo. In our daily lives, we fail to exercise our critical-thinking muscles and instead leave it to others to draw conclusions.

You’ll learn how our obsession with certainty leads us astray and why all progress takes place in uncertain conditions.

Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo.

We’re all programmed with the same fear of the uncertain. Our predecessors who weren’t afraid of the unknown became food for saber-toothed tigers. But the ancestors who viewed uncertainty as life-threatening lived long enough to pass their genes on to us.

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”

every annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos includes the same cryptic line: “It remains Day 1.” After repeating this mantra for a few decades, Bezos was asked what Day 2 would look like. He replied, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

The journey cannot end once the mission is accomplished. That’s when the real work begins. When success brings complacency—when we tell ourselves that now that we’ve discovered the New World, there’s no reason to return—we become a shadow of our former selves.