The Science of Success Podcast

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How to Think Like A Rocket Scientist with Ozan Varol

Lace Gilger
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In this episode, we dig deep into the science of decision making and thinking with best-selling author Ozan Varol. Ozan and I discuss how to pivot, dig into his incredible story and life journey, and how we can question our assumptions and challenge our own opinions!

Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist, award-winning law professor, and author. While at Cornell University, he served on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers project that sent two rovers to Mars. He later became a law professor to influence others to make interplanetary leaps on this planet. He has written numerous award-winning articles that are taught in colleges and graduate schools. His work has been featured in domestic and foreign media, including BBC, TIME, CNN, Washington Post, Slate, and Foreign Policy. He is the author Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life.

  • What it’s like being on a team that sent a rover to Mars. 

  • How to think like a rocket scientist by thinking big, flirting with uncertainty, and facing failure head-on. 

  • How to solve a problem when, in the past, there’s been no solution. 

  • Lessons from some of the world’s top innovators. 

  • How to begin to question your assumptions. 

    • Spend an entire day questioning all the assumptions you make that day. 

  • What is a pre-mortem - and why it helps keep you out of trouble and avoiding failure? 

  • How to leverage outsiders to make sure you’re not missing any gaps in your own decision-making process. 

  • How to fight groupthink. 

  • Kill Your Intellectual Darlings - Beat the sh*t out of your own ideas. 

  • Why the Growth Mindset is 100% science. 

  • The two questions you must absolutely ask to fight your inner critic in any situation. 

  • How to make a decisive and beneficial pivot in your own life.

  • What are the first principals and how do we leverage them in our own lives?

  • How Elon Musk created SpaceX and built his own rockets. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:10] AF: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with over five million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. Thank you for listening. My name is Austin Fabel.

Today, we have an incredible interview with a man named Ozan Varol. Ozan is a rocket scientist, award-winning law professor and author. While at Cornell University, he served on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers Project that sent not one, but two rovers to Mars. In this interview, we dig deep into the science of decision-making and thinking. We really dig into his incredible story and his journey. I cannot wait to share this interview with you.

Then we dig into how we can question our assumptions and challenge our own opinions and ultimately, think like a rocket scientist.

Are you a fan of the show? Head over to www.successpodcast.com and sign up for our e-mail list today. You're going to get a ton of free goodies, including a guide as soon as you sign up, you'll get our newsletter called Mindset Monday, as well as immediate access to all of our interviews when they go live.

Are you on the go right now? Not a problem. Just text Smarter, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to 44-222 to get subscribed today.

Without further ado, enjoy our interview with Ozan Varol.

[00:01:34] AF: Ozan, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:01:36] OV: Thank you so much for having me on, Austin.

[00:01:38] AF: Well, it's great to have you on. I really appreciate you taking the time and digging through your work, I’ve got to say it's an honor to have you on. You've got a very, very interesting background and I’d love to start there. For listeners who may not know you or be familiar with your work, share your story with us. Tell us a little about your journey and some of the past projects you've worked on, then of course, we'll dig into what you're working on now as well. Very excited about that.

[00:01:58] OV: Sounds good. I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. I lived there for 17 years. Grew up in a family of no English speakers. Started to learn English, I think it probably would have been around 11. Then came to the United States for college. I majored in astrophysics at Cornell. While there, I worked on the operations team for the Mars Exploration Rovers Project.

My interest in astrophysics really began when I was, I think this would have been around five or six-years-old in the apartment that I grew up in Istanbul. We get these really frequent blackouts, which would scare the crap out of me as a five-year-old and my dad came up with this game. He would grab my soccer ball, light up a candle and he'd rotate the soccer ball around the candle and the candle would be representing the sun and the soccer ball the earth. Those were my very, very first astronomy lessons and I was hooked.

After that, I became obsessed with astronomy, getting my hands on every astronomy book, every science fiction book I could find. My dream was to eventually come to the United States to work on a space mission of some sort.

Before I arrived, I think this was a couple weeks before I got to Cornell, I was looking at what the astronomy department was up to and I saw that one of the professors, his name is Steve Squires, was in charge of this planned mission to Mars. There was no job listing, but I just decided, “Hey, I’m just going to reach out to him and ask if I can work for him.” I taught myself how to program in high school. I just e-mailed him, attached my resume and said, “I would just die to work for you.”

The moment I arrived at Cornell, he invited me in for an interview and I got the job and the rest is history. I got to work on this amazing mission that went to Mars in 2003. We had built these rovers to last for 90 days each. We sent two. Their names were Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit ended up lasting for six years and I still get chills when I say this, but Opportunity rove the red planet for nearly 15 years. This is 15 years into its 90-day mission. It was such an honor to work on that project. That eventually culminated in the book that I wrote that recently came out called Think Like a Rocket Scientist.

[00:04:26] AF: Such an incredible background. I love everything from just the imagery of your dad instilling this curiosity and using a soccer ball and a candle. Then also, one of the biggest questions we get about the show is how do you get these people to come on the show? We've interviewed a lot of folks. The answer really is just we've reached out. A lot of people don't really know what they can get if they just ask. I think that you reaching out cold, there's no job description, but you saw something that you wanted to be a part of, and reaching out and taking the initiative to not just look at the website and say, “Oh, there's no job postings. They must not be looking for anybody.” Really taking the bull by the horns, to use the metaphor, and really making reality out of your dreams.

[00:05:07] OV: That's such an important point. I do remember writing that e-mail. Before I hit send, the voice of the inner critic showed up and basically said, “What are you doing? You're going to make a fool out of yourself. There is no job listing. You're not qualified. You're a skinny kid with a funny name from a country halfway around the world, who has a really thick accent at the time, which eventually disappeared. What could you possibly contribute to this?”

Then I asked myself two questions, which are still two questions that I ask myself to this day whenever I’m afraid of making a leap. The first question is, what's the worst that can happen? Now the worst that can happen in a scenario like that is I just never hear back from him, right? He just ignores my e-mail saying like, “Okay. This guy is a fool. He has nothing to contribute, so I’m not going to invite him in.” That is the worst that can happen.

Then the second question I ask, which often we don't ask is what's the best that can happen? What is the most optimal outcome out of the scenario? It's really important to ask that question, because our mind is, I’m quoting Rick Hansen here, but it's velcro for negative thoughts and teflon for positive ones. When we think of worst-case scenarios, those tend to get exacerbated in our heads. It's really important to ask a second question of like, “Well, what's the best that can happen?” In my case, the answer to that was I got to work on a Mars mission. I get to do this thing that I’ve dreamed of doing since I was five-years-old. I asked myself those questions and when the answers are in front of you, the course of action is so clear. I clicked send and I’m so glad I did.

[00:06:53] AF: Yeah, that's incredible story. I think it's so relatable for a lot of people. It's funny that you quote Rick Hansen. We actually, Matt, our other host was actually slated to interview him right now on another line –

[00:07:04] OV: That’s awesome.

[00:07:05] AF: He just rescheduled last minute and we're going to get Rick on. He's been on the show a couple of times, but what a funny circumstance. I think it's awesome too. I mean, when you look go through the worst that can happen and you say, “Well, the worst that’s going to happen is he doesn't respond.” I think, even in my head sometimes like, “Well, the worst could happen would be he'd forward the e-mail to all of his colleagues and there's a Washington Post article written about how we shouldn't call into Cornell for random jobs.” I can go a little deeper.

One thing also that I’ve heard from numerous guests about fear setting too is when you think about that worse that can happen, going a level deeper even, if that worst thing did happen, how hard would it be for you to get back to your current state? For you, it's like, you're already there. I mean, you're already in that current state, so there's really no stakes, at least not in the way that you might imagine them from that inner critic.

[00:07:49] OV: Yup, exactly.

[00:07:50] AF: I want to dig into the new book. It's a great book. I recommend picking up a copy for anybody listening. It's called Think Like a Rocket Scientist. Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life. Give us a little bit of the premise and I want to dive into some of the meat as well. Why did you decide to write this book?

[00:08:05] OV: I opened the book by telling the story of John F. Kennedy back in September 1962, when he steps up to the podium at Rice University Stadium and pledges to put a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth. Now at the time when he made that promise, people thought he was crazy. People sitting in the audience thought he was crazy, but officials at NASA thought he was out of his mind as well.

What he was promising was literally a moon shot, because so many of the prerequisite required for a moon landing hadn't been developed yet. No American astronaut had worked outside of a spacecraft. Two spacecraft had never docked together in space. We knew so little about the moon, NASA didn't know if the lunar surface would be solid enough to support a lander, or if the lander, if it like, you landed on there, it would just cave right through.

Some of the metals, Kennedy said, required to build the rockets, hadn't even been invented yet. We jumped into the cosmic void and hoped we'd grow wings on the way up. Grow those wings we did. A child who was just six-years-old when the Wright Brothers took their first power flight, which lasted all of 10 seconds and moved a 100 feet would have been 72 when flight became powerful enough to put a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth.

We looked at that giant leap and say, well, that's the triumph of technology, but I think that's a misleading story. It's really the triumph of the humans behind the technology and a certain thought process they used to turn the seemingly impossible into the possible. I wanted to write a book dedicated to that thought process. The premise of the book is look, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to think like one. You can take these nine simple strategies from rocket science and use them to make your own giant leaps in work and life, whether it's landing your dream job, developing a new skill, or creating the next breakthrough product.

Rocket science tends to be really intimidating, right? Hence the saying, it's rocket science, or it's not rocket science. I wanted to write a book not about the science behind rocket science, but about these strategies that rocket scientists use to approach problems, to deal with uncertainty, to deal with failure, to deal with success and how they use them to their own benefit.

[00:10:29] AF: I love the premise for the book. I think it's something that's definitely needed in the world now. It's not a topic that we are unaccustomed to here on the show. I mean, building mental models and teaching yourself how to think, to take your life to the next level is a huge focus, so I think the book really aligns with everything that we believe in and we try to bring to our audience.

It's such an interesting thought too that the things that these rocket scientists are trying to solve have never been solved before. You're really in a lot of ways, it's exciting because there's a blank slate. There's no traditional thinking to rely on that gives you guard rails that you might fall into. On the other hand, it can be very intimidating because you have no playbook. Again, I mean, the other side of the coin is you're – really, nothing's off the table, but nothing's been put on the table to begin with.

[00:11:13] OV: Absolutely. It can be really intimidating. I remember working on this Mars mission and we picked two landing sites for the two different rovers. We had some idea of what to expect from these landing sites, because we could look at the photos of the landing sites from orbit, but once we actually landed, they turned out to be so different from what we expected.

What we did was to learn the problems that Mars gave us, or try to solve the problems that Mars gave us, as opposed to the problems that we expected to solve. One of the ways we did that is use the Swiss Army Knife approach. We had so many different tools onboard the rover that could be adapted to different uses.

Now I mentioned this example, because it's particularly relevant to what's going on in the world right now. We're recording this episode around mid-May when the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic is going on full force. If you're in a position where the pandemic has disrupted the way you run your life, or the way you run your business, the question that we asked ourselves when we landed on Mars is also a useful question for you to ask yourself.

Instead of asking, okay, here are the problems that I expected to solve, but those problems are now off the table. How can I solve the problems that the universe threw at me? How can I use my skills, resources, products, services in a way that I haven't used them before, but that I need to use given the problems that the world needs solving at this particular point in time?

[00:12:50] AF: Yeah. It's such a great question to ask. I think when you even look – I mean, everyone's gotten an e-mail about a COVID-19 response at this point from everybody and their grandmother. I think a lot of the companies that have really thrived right now have done just that. I mean, I was reading an article today about a restaurant owner whose restaurant is Michelin stars. It's basically considered art, very much an experience, but they've actually maintained their entire staff and they've actually increased profits, because they were able to pivot so quickly and change what they were offering their customers and even their employees to make it all we're in this together.

For instance, they got rid of employee salaries. Everyone made $15 an hour. Anything above what they needed to cover cost was split among the staff. It's like, how do you take these things you've got and pivot what the goals were when everything was running the way that they should be, and then realign the incentives and what you're doing to match the goals of the current environment?

That brings us back to the nine essential principles in the book. I’d like to just list them out right now to give all the listeners a framework. You have become a connoisseur of uncertainty, reason from first principles, play mind games, reach for the moon, reframe questions, kill your intellectual darlings, which I’m going to dig into that for sure, test as you fly, fly as you test, do not fail fast and be wary of unbroken success. Now as we begin to peel these layers back, one that jumps out at me is just critically important is reason from first principles. Explain what that means to us.

[00:14:21] OV: Let me answer that with a story. The story is of Elon Musk starting SpaceX. When he first thought about sending rockets to Mars, what he first did was to shop on the American market first and then go to the Russian market as well, to purchase rockets that other people had built. That turned out to be really, really expensive. At the time, Elon Musk was a rich guy. He had just sold PayPal to eBay. Even given his budgets, the rockets were way too expensive.

He was about to give up actually, but then he realized that his reasoning was flawed in trying to buy rockets that other people had built. He realized that he was not reasoning from first principles. Reasoning from first principles means, basically taking a complex system and boiling it down to its non-negotiable sub-components. You're hacking through assumptions in your life as if you're hacking through a jungle with a machete to get to the fundamental raw materials.

For Elon Musk, reason informed first principles meant okay, set aside rockets that other people built. What does it take to actually build a rocket and put a rocket into space? He looked at the raw materials of a rocket. It turned out that if you tried to buy those raw materials on the market, it would be 2% of the typical cost of a rocket.

For him, it was a no-brainer. Using first principles he said, “All right. Well, I’m just going to build my rockets from scratch myself in the factory, as opposed to building rockets that other people had built.” First principles also led him to question another deeply held assumption in rocket science, which is that rockets for decades couldn't be reused. Once they launched their cargo into orbit, they would plunge into the ocean, or burn up in the atmosphere requiring an entirely new rocket to be built.

Now imagine for a moment doing that for commercial flights. I live in Portland, Oregon. I fly from Portland to Los Angeles, the passengers de-plane and then someone steps up to the plane and just torches it. That's basically what we did for rockets. By the way, the cost of a modern rocket is about the same thing as a Boeing 737, more or less. Commercial flight is so much cheaper, because airplanes can be reused quickly over and over and over again.

Elon Musk along with Jeff Bezos and his space company below origin, both questioned that deeply held assumption in rocket science that rockets couldn't be reused. Now at Cape Canaveral, there is a landing pad next to a launch pad for the rocket to land. I mean, there's still a ways to go, but both companies have refurbished and reused and sent numerous rocket stages back into space like certified pre-owned vehicles basically. That's all thanks to first principles thinking.

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[00:18:09] AF: Such an incredible story and it's really inspiring to think what other assumptions are we all making in our lives that we really haven't questioned, but might actually yield incredible results or breakthroughs. Part of that too is I know you've touched on the past how you can reverse engineer your own processes to find these holes in your thinking. How do we go about that? Say, I’ve always gone along Elon Musk, like I look around and I say, “Well, things have always been done this way.” How do I start to ask the right questions of myself and my thinking to find these breakthroughs?

[00:18:39] OV: There are a number of things you can do. One is to actually spend a day questioning your assumptions. Look at your routines, your habits, your budget items, your processes and ask yourself, “Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this, or replace it with something better?” One example of that question for my own life is – so my book came out on April 14th and I had this big book tour plan that was going to travel all around the United States and give talks. With the pandemic, the book tour got cancelled.

I had to step back and ask myself and reason from first principles, think like a rocket scientist and ask myself, “All right. Can't do a book tour anymore. What can I do instead to get the word out about the book?” That actually forced me to question, whether it was a good idea to do a book tour in the first place? If I’m being honest with myself, I was doing a book tour not because I had reason from first principles, but because that's what I thought authors are supposed to do. You write a book, you go on a book tour. I was copying and pasting what other authors that I admire had done before me.

If you step back and ask yourself, is it really a good use of my time for me to fly to New York City from Portland across the country, go to a Barnes & Noble and sign books for 50 people? Or are there better ways for me to engage with my readers and get the word out that don't require a multi-day, multi-week commitment for me? The answer to that is absolutely yes.

I was able to come up with creative ways of getting the word out virtually after the pandemic forced me to question the status quo in my life. I think it's better to do this proactively as opposed to defensively by asking yourself, why am I doing what I’m doing? Can I get rid of this and replace it with something better?

Another tactic that I use is to bring outsiders into the conversation. Experts tend to be way too close to the problem to think differently. Don't get me wrong, expertise is really valuable. If you're trying to achieve something transformative, you usually need input from outsiders to whatever it is you're working on. This doesn't have to mean an expensive coach or a consultant. It can simply mean bringing in a friend, your significant other, or someone from a different division in your company to come in and ask yourself those like, what we pejoratively call dumb questions, but they're actually not dumb at all.

They go to some fundamental aspect of the problem that you're missing, because you are way too close to it to be able to spot the same outdated assumptions that you've been operating under for decades, for years. That's why, by the way, when you look at some of these gate crashers, like I mentioned two names, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for the aerospace industry, they're outsiders. Elon Musk came from Silicon Valley. He learned about rocket science by reading rocket science textbooks. Jeff Bezos came from Amazon and they're both disrupting the aerospace industry.

Another example I give in the book is Reed Hastings and how he co-founded Netflix. He was an outsider to the video industry. He was a software developer before he co-founded Netflix, but he was able to spot the outdated assumptions in the video industry, the video rental industry. Meaning, you have to pay late fees, you have to have physical stores and question those assumptions to build a transformative product.

[00:22:16] AF: So powerful. I love all the examples there. The book tour example is very interesting to me too, because you go through all the just leg work that requires to reach 50 people. Then really, I mean, we find ourselves sitting here. I’m in my office, you're in yours. I’m in Nashville. You're in Oregon. We're going to reach probably more people than you would inside of a Barnes & Noble. It's the most impactful way forward is not always what's been done in the past and I just love the lesson.

[00:22:43] OV: Exactly.

[00:22:44] AF: There's another thing too and this must be a space thing, because you've spoken about something else which is brainstorming – before you make a decision, brainstorming all the reasons your idea might fail and how that can help ensure long-term success. We had a previous guest on, Commander Chris Hadfield. He said something extremely similar. He was just like, “Well, before we launch a mission up to the international space station, we go through everything that could possibly go wrong.” Then for him, he actually had a malfunction in his suit, caused some glass cleaner to go into his eye and he's basically on a spacewalk floating in outer space completely blind. He attributed his ability to stay calm and to get back in to that planning.

When you look through all the different negative possibilities, how do you go through all the ways the idea might fail? Then ultimately, what benefit does that give you when you're making your decisions?

[00:23:35] OV: There are two exercises that I like to use. One is called the pre-mortem, which is very similar to what Chris Hadfield described on the show. Basically, what you do is you assume that the project failed, so the mission was a failure. You work backward from that to figure out the reasons why it may have failed. Going back to my book, I might say okay, I have to turn in this book by April 2019, I think was my deadline, or May 2019 to the publisher. I’ll assume that that failed and I’ll work backward from that to try to figure out why it may have failed.

It may have failed because I spent too much time on the research and too little time on the writing. It may have failed, because I didn't hire the right people. By identifying everything that can go wrong beforehand and then planning ahead for those worst case scenarios is really, really powerful. For those who are listening, you can apply this in your own life by saying, “All right. Why might my boss pass me up for a promotion? Why is this prospective employer justified in not hiring me?”

In answering those questions, avoid answering them as you would that dreadful interview question, tell me about your weaknesses, which tends to induce humble bragging. People say things like, “I work too hard.”

[00:24:56] AF: I’ve been there before, maybe once or twice.

[00:24:58] OV: Yeah. Right, exactly. Instead, really get into the shoes of the person who might reject your promotion, or refuse to hire you and ask yourself why might that happen. Why are they making that choice? Those questions usually tend to pinpoint you to things that are lying in your blind spots that you'll be able to figure out by going through the motions here. You can do this at your company as well if you run a business. Doing this exercise gives your staff members some safety to come forward.

One of the things that derails success is group think. People don't want to be the skunk at the picnic. They're reluctant to raise their hands and voice dissent, because they fear retribution of some sort from their supervisors, or from their team members. When you say, “All right. We're going to conduct this exercise, where we assume that whatever we're working on failed,” then that gives people basically safety in coming forward and saying, “All right. There's actually this weakness with this project that's been bugging me. I haven't shared it until now, but I’m going to share it right now, because this is part of this exercise that we are conducting.” It can be a really, really powerful way of unearthing potential problems before you pull the trigger.

[00:26:20] AF: Yeah, I love that. I think it's so important too, it's a neat way to make an exercise out of allowing people to poke holes they may not feel comfortable bringing forward. I think everybody's been in that scenario before, where your mind is screaming like, “This isn't going to work. This isn't going to work.” But you don't want to be like you said, the skunk at the picnic. I’m going to have to use that in the future.

Let's dig back into some of the nine essential principles. Kill your intellectual darlings. I love the aggression in that advice. Tell us what it means.

[00:26:52] OV: That principle is so central to the way that scientists work. The scientific method basically requires you to come up with hypotheses to explain some phenomenon. Then what you do from there is to kill your intellectual darlings. You beat the crap out of your own ideas. That's the only way that scientists can begin to develop some confidence in their hypotheses. That I think is such a stark contrast to the way that we normally operate outside of the scientific world. We try to prove ourselves right, as opposed to prove ourselves wrong. This is particularly prevalent in politics. People don't change their minds.

When they do, they're usually accused of flip-flopping, or being the person who's not suited for political office. Whereas for scientists, changing your mind is the name of the game. That's what scientists do. If you discover facts that call into question an assumption you have, a hypothesis you had, you welcome that, because the goal in science is to not be right, but to find what's right.

I think that goal is really important outside of science as well. That's how you develop confidence in your own ideas. You don't learn anything by trying to prove yourself right, which by the way with biases like the confirmation bias, for example, we look for evidence and facts that confirm what we think we know. When you Google a search result, or when you Google a question, you probably have some idea as to what to expect and when those answers come up, you're going to click on the first link that confirms your preconceptions about that.

That means you're not learning anything new. To be able to learn something new and grow, you should look for evidence that this confirms, that falsifies what you think is true, as opposed to the other way around. This is becoming increasingly harder, because we've been algorithmically sorted into these echo chambers. We friend people like us on Facebook. We follow people like us on Twitter. When we see dissenting opinions, it's so easy to disengage from them. Just unfriend, unfollow, unsubscribe.

That means we're also not being exposed to ideas that are different from our own. When this creates all sorts of problems, it becomes really hard to then engage with people who are on the other side of the spectrum, but it also means that your own ideas aren't being stress tested as much as they should be, nearly as much as they should be, which means you've got blind spots that you're not seeing.

[00:29:37] AF: Yeah, many great points there. I think it's also the algorithm thing has always really, really intrigued me. I guess, it was about two years ago at Thanksgiving. I was sitting around with some family members and I just realized, Facebook has ruined Thanksgiving and family holidays. Because on one side, you've got the members who – I mean, I don't want to get political here, but Republican and Democrat, the two main sides. Then you've got people at the table. In my family, we've got both sides represented.

Everyone speaks as though it's a foregone conclusion that everyone else at the table has their opinion, because that's all they see on Facebook. It's like, “Man, everyone must be seeing these articles.” It really, at least in my personal scenario, it really unhinged a bunch of people's tongues, especially after a couple glasses of wine that they exacerbated the situation.

Looping back to the whole idea of killing your intellectual darling, something you said really rang true to me and that is they want to change their opinions. They want to find what's right. It reminds me of Carol Dweck and a lot of her work on mindsets and specifically, the growth mindset. As a scientist, you shouldn't be concerned of looking right and looking like the hero and the genius and all the credits.

What the focus really is is finding what's true. Then adopting that into what you do and move forward and how we build out the world that we live in technologically and scientifically. It's not about credit and it's not about being afraid to flip-flop and change your opinion, because of new information, which really strikes me as something that I think everyone, especially in today's world of sound bites and social media could really, really stand to learn from. It's not about winning the argument, it's about learning more.

[00:31:20] OV: Exactly. When it becomes about winning the argument, we lose so much in the process. I mean, one of the side effects of this is – of the dynamic you described at Thanksgiving table is our beliefs start to become intertwined with our identities. If you believe in primal eating, you become paleo. If you believe in a plant-based diet, you become a vegan. If you do CrossFit, you're a CrossFitter. When your beliefs are intertwined with your identity, it means changing your mind is tantamount to changing your identity, which is really, really difficult for people to do, which is why by the way, simple disagreements in the modern world turn into these just existential death matches, because so much more than our beliefs and our arguments are at stake, it is our identity that's at stake.

One way to overcome that barrier is to again, try to kill your intellectual darlings and put some separation between your identity as a person and your beliefs. Scientists do that all the time. Scientists are not their opinions. They are not their hypotheses. The moment, by the way, they wrap up their identity around the hypothesis is when they start fooling themselves. As Richard Feynman says, the first principle is you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. It really pays off to put some separation between you as a person, your arguments and your beliefs and then seek this confirming evidence.

One of the examples I’ve done that with writing the book is when I finish the draft, I have this support network of friends and colleagues and mentors and I went to them to get feedback on the book. The first question I asked them was, what is wrong with the book? Tell me what needs to be cut. Tell me what needs to be taken out of the book. Tell me what parts of the book don't make sense, because I need to hear them from you now, not a year from now when the book is published.

That questioning, inviting dissent and inviting this agreement going back to safety and what we talked about before with the pre-mortem, gives people the freedom if they're otherwise reluctant to share criticism with you, if they're more prone to praising your work, that question, that affirmative stance on your part of asking tell me what's wrong with this, will give them safety to come forward and actually share the crucial critical feedback you need to make your work much better than it was before.

[00:33:58] AF: Yeah. That's such a great best practice. I feel like I’ve heard that before. I think Tim Ferriss does something similar to that. He's accredited that to being one of the best tools for writing a book and making sure that it hits on the first time out.

One of the other principles that you touched on, I want to be respectful of your time and I will begin to wrap up here in a minute with a couple of rapid fire questions. One of the essential principles is play mind games. As a big fan of games in general, strategy games, video games, board games, card games, what are you talking about here?

[00:34:30] OV: I’m referring specifically to conducting thought experiments. The example that opens that chapter is a 16-year-old Albert Einstein sitting and asking himself, what would it be like to ride next to a beam of light? That question, by the way, sounds nonsensical. He sat with that question for 10 years and the answer he came up with resulted in the special theory of relativity.

We are so reluctant to pose those thought experiments to play mind games, to set up the sorts of scenarios we set up in our heads, like fantasy worlds we set up in our heads when we were little kids. That I think on the research shows, undermines creativity. When we don't pause and think and deliberate and carve off time and space in our lives for free thinking, our creativity suffers as a result.

There is a section in the play mind games chapter called why you should get bored more often. Boredom to me, a few years ago, I remember distinctly, I was getting out of bed, I reached over to my phone to get my daily dose of notifications. It I had an epiphany. I realized that I hadn't been bored in such a long time. Because I was moving from one meeting to the next, one notification to the next and I wasn't carving off time for boredom, which I would define as spending large amounts of unstructured time free of distractions.

When you don't do that, your subconscious doesn't have the ability, doesn't have the space it needs to connect different ideas in your head, to cross-pollinate what you're working on, to solve problems. The decline of boredom in my own life and research I cite in the book bears this out, corresponded with also a decline in my creativity.

One of the things I did was to become really purposeful about carving off these spaces and time in my life to think. I have a recliner in my office and I’ll sit there for 20 minutes just with every day, just with a notepad and a pen. Some of the best ideas that have occurred to me in recent memory have come up during those moments of silence. This is really hard to innovate. It's really hard to be creative when you're busy trying to get to inbox zero. That's not when innovation happens.

Hustle and innovation are antithetical to each other. As the saying goes, it’s the silence between the notes that makes the music. There are so many examples that I cite in the book that are cited elsewhere and discussed elsewhere as well, one of the ideas and I’m sure, those who are listening to this, know ideas tend to come in the shower, ideas tend to come when you're walking, ideas tend to come when you're cooking, when you're letting your brain rest and make the type of connections that it needs to make, to be able to generate breakthrough ideas.

In today's day and age, we need to be really purposeful about doing that. I would highly recommend that people carve off time. You might call it airplane mode, for you to just sit and do nothing, but think.

[00:37:51] AF: Yeah. It's such a powerful tool and so often overlooked. Like you said, I mean, I think everyone's had that aha moment while sitting in the shower, or standing in the shower, rather hopefully. Well, great Ozan. This has been incredible. I really appreciate the time. You've been very generous with us.

I want to close with just one last question and then I want to let listeners know where they can find you. Obviously, thinking like a rocket scientist, great framework for anybody listening to the show now. Who do you think is the greatest thinker of our time?

[00:38:22] OV: That's a great question. There are so many role models in my life, but the first name that jumped to mind when you asked that question, Austin, was Adam Grant. Adam's work – I mean, he is such a brilliant thinker, but he does what a lot of academics don't do, which is to take these seemingly esoteric and hard to translate academic concepts and share them with popular audiences in a way that anyone can understand.

If you read his books, like Give and Take and Originals, the final product looks so easy and so simple and so adjustable from the perspective of a popular audience, but it conceals a really, really difficult messy work of looking at esoteric academic research and actually simplifying it. That I think is a really, really hard thing to do and Adam does it brilliantly.

[00:39:25] AF: Yeah. We love Adam. We've actually been fortunate enough to have him on the show as well and he's just incredible individual to be, as young as he is and who’ve accomplished what he's accomplished.

Ozan, thank you so much for the time. Please let us know where we can find more. Where can we buy the book? Where can we learn more about you and your work? Where would you direct us?

[00:39:43] OV: The best way to keep in touch with me is through my e-mail list. I’m not active on social media. If you'd like to sign up for my e-mail list, you can go to weeklycontrarian.com and the e-mail goes out to over 21,000 people every Thursday. It just shares one idea that can be read in three minutes or less, that helps you, empowers you to reimagine the status quo. That's at weeklycontrarian.com.

Then my book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist, it's available wherever books are sold. I do have a special offer for your audience, Austin. If they head over to rocketsciencebook.com/success, I have a series of, I think it's 12 bite-sized, really quick-it three-minute videos that share practical actionable insights from the book that people can implement right away. You can find all of those videos at rocketsciencebook.com/success. You'll see instructions on there once you order the book and forward it to a specific e-mail address. I’ll share those videos with you.

[00:40:52] AF: You are too kind. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a fascinating conversation. I would highly recommend anyone listening to go check out the book. Again, it's Think Like a Rocket Scientist. Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life. Ozan, thanks so much for the time today and best of luck in the future.

[00:41:09] OV: Thank you so much, Austin. It was my pleasure.

[00:41:11] AF: Thank you, everyone, again for listening. We're glad you spent some time with us here on the Science of Success. As a reminder, if you haven't already, head to our website and sign up for our e-mail newsletter, www.successpodcast.com. You'll get a ton of free goodies, including our free guide to remembering anything when you sign up. You'll also get access to our newsletter and our interviews as soon as they go live and all of the great content here on the Science of Success.

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