Wonders of Amazon… they know me so well that they make some amazing book recommendations for me. This has been helpful for me to develop my book habit again. I realized I was reading so much that I decided to ditch iPad for e-book reading and bought a new Kindle (a paperwhite one).
Anyways, one of the books that I read was Think Like a Rocket Scientist, written by Ozan Varol. It is a very easily digestible book that taught me so much that I wanted to share with you.
When we think of rocket scientists, we think of “people that are doing crazy difficult work”, “mega smart people”, or in my case, “some people that do things that are too difficult for a normal person like me to understand”. This is actually true in my case – I love science, and I would loved to study rocket science and/or engineering, but I realized that I am just not cut out for it after I took a few courses in my first year of engineering school in college.
I realized it wasn’t for me and made one of the best decisions of my life – switched to arts and sciences to major in biology and economics, and also changed my career path to finance, AKA, the dark side.
I have been a big fan of Virgin Galactic (still hodling!) and watching successful missions from SpaceX has really re-ignited my interest in space industry, and I spent more time on Amazon, looking for books to learn more about the industry – as mentioned above, this is how I came across
“Think like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life” by Ozan Varol
There were so many helpful insights and wanted to share them below
BACK-casting- think backwards from the goal
When President Kennedy declared that we will be sending humans to the moon, NASA was apparently caught off guard as they were not ready. Therefore, NASA took a back-casting approach – they carefully thought about what the projects need to be done step-by-step backwards from sending people on the moon. That blueprint has obviously led to the massive success that APOLLO project was.
When you are working so hard at work and career, you are so busy dealing with daily challenges and often forget about your true long-term goal and become “directionless”. I certainly was directionless – I increasingly focused on what other people thought were good or what would pay me the most this year – completely missing the big picture. This had kept me from really setting the right long-term goal and I feel that I was not growing / developing. Yes, I was getting promoted / moving to a bigger firm / got paid more year over year, but I forgot about my LT goal – getting involved in developing great therapeutics to help many patients. I was just trading stocks.
Perhaps it is really important that you spent 30 mins a day to ponder about your long-term goal and take a back-casting approach to think about how you will get there and whether your current position / trajectory fits that back-casting path.
Yogi Barra said “If you don’t know where you are going, you might not there there”. Amazing words – if you are spending everyday without knowing where you want to be later, you will obviously not get there / achieve your long-term dream / goal / vision.
Fast learning is important, but not fast failing
Fail fast is almost a mantra in Silicon Valley. “Fail fast, fail often, fail forward” – meaning execute fast and move onto the next if it does not work out. There has been a scientific study to prove whether this is truly helpful for success, but the result was complete opposite – there was no statistically significant difference between the success rate between those who have already failed once or twice and those who are starting their business for the first time.
Further inspection has revealed that those who are starting for 2nd or 3rd time often attributed their failure to external factors and did not have a true moment of introspection to identify their own internal flaws – which inevitably led to their failure in their next venture.
In rocket science, failure directly leads to catastrophe – death of astronauts, and therefore they are extremely careful with projects. Also, they take extremely detailed notes on failures. NASA keeps a failure log that goes back to 1960s – all the failures are logged in so that they would (hopefully) never repeat such mistakes.
Failure is a must-have for innovation and creativity, but there wouldn’t be innovation and creativity in the future without learnings from failures.
Input is the most important and way more important than output – only after you embrace the failure possibility then you can have truly creative and innovative results
Current society is extremely result-driven (especially in finance). However, true innovators are thinking completely different in that they see input to be more important than the result. They look at the quality of decision at the time – did the team look at enough data in judicious and scrupulous manner? The innovators understand that there are so many factors that drive the outcome while only thing that is under control is the input that went into the decision.
The author mentions Amazon’s Fire smartphone development team. The smartphone project was not very successful in terms of result – not much revenue, however, many of them were promoted – because Amazon leadership recognized that it was an extremely difficult project to be successful and the technology developed through the project ended up becoming very useful in other Amazon projects.
This is also extremely helpful psychologically – when you are focused on input, you are more free from the psychological swings that come with day to day data point that may or may not give clue on potential result (particularly in stock price). We can only control the input that goes into our day-to-day decision making!
In conclusion…
It is great to talk about a great book – in today’s world, many are picking up knowledge / wisdom through youtube, but I continue to believe that books are the most efficient medium to acquire knowledge and expand wisdom. Over time, I certainly hope that books will help me become a better investor with better thought process, greater knowledge base, and deeper wisdom.
Now that I have left finance industry, I get to spend my last 30 minutes reading a book instead of checking futures and Asian stock markets – a great fun activity that I had not been able to do since I left college.
Hope you enjoy reading!
If you are interested, please feel free to use below link!
Next review will be on Vanderbilt – the first tycoon. I love history books.
Howdy this is somewhat of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding experience so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!
Out of my examination, shopping for electronics online may be easily expensive, nonetheless there are some how-to’s that you can use to help you get the best bargains. There are constantly ways to come across discount bargains that could help make one to ge thet best electronic products products at the smallest prices. Interesting blog post.