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

Testing has another upside. By definition, it allows you to practice failure in a relatively safe environment. Rocket scientists fail regularly, but for many of us—particularly in newer generations—failure can be an unfamiliar experience.

In focusing on the facts in front of us, we don’t focus enough—or at all—on the missing facts. As the focal facts scream for attention, we must ask, “What am I not seeing? What fact should be present, but is not?”

The success rate of first-time entrepreneurs was nearly equal to the success rate of entrepreneurs who had previously failed in business.

In our daily lives, we fail to exercise our critical-thinking muscles and instead leave it to others to draw conclusions. As a result, these muscles atrophy over time. Without an informed public willing to question confident claims, democracy decays and misinformation spreads. Once alternative facts are reported and retweeted, they become the truth

Testing as you fly requires a multilayered approach.

This isn’t to suggest that all original ideas come from beginners. To the contrary, expertise is valuable in idea generation, but experts shouldn’t work in complete isolation, the lone genius lore be damned. Experts also benefit from intermittent periods of collaboration, particularly when amateurs are brought into the mix.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that failure is an option. But it’s something else entirely to celebrate it. To take the sting and shame out of failure, Silicon Valley overcorrected. The pendulum swung too far in the other direction.

Redundancy in aerospace refers to a backup created to avoid a single point of failure that can compromise the entire mission. Spacecraft are designed to operate even when things go wrong—to fail without failing.

less than seven years after Kennedy’s pledge, Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind.