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

In addition to including redundancies, rocket scientists address uncertainty by building in margins of safety. For example, they build spacecraft stronger than what appears necessary or make thermal insulation thicker than required. These margins of safety protect the spacecraft in case the uncertain environment of space turns out to be more hostil

“I’ve come from behind too often,” the great tennis champion Andre Agassi writes, “and had too many opponents come roaring back against me, to think that’s a good idea.”35 The opening doesn’t have to be grand, as long as the finale is.

“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 That’s my moonshot for you: Be more unreasonable. Breakthroughs, after all, are reasonable only in hindsight. “The day before a ma

As one study shows, National Football League (NFL) coaches change their lineup after a one-point loss, but don’t change it after a one-point win—even though these minor score differences are often poor indicators of player performance.42 Most of us act like American football coaches, treating success and failure as binary outcomes. But we don’t liv

“Fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen,” writes Hadfield. “When you feel helpless, you’re far more afraid than you would be if you knew the facts. If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.”

The safety net may be there to catch you if you fall, but you’re better off pretending it doesn’t exist.

Writing down your concerns and uncertainties—what you know and what you don’t know—undresses them. Once you lift up the curtain and turn the unknown unknowns into known unknowns, you defang them. After you see your fears with their masks off, you’ll find that the feeling of uncertainty is often far worse than what you fear. You’ll also realize that

Surviving your own success can be more difficult than surviving your own failure. We must treat success like a seemingly friendly group of Greeks bearing a big, beautiful gift called a Trojan horse. We must take measures to maintain humility before the Greeks arrive. We must treat our work—and ourselves—as permanent works in progress.

Testing as you fly requires a multilayered approach.