What does constructing a rocket have in common with launching one of the most successful streaming services of all time? Unconventional thinking. From venturing into uncharted territory in entrepreneurial “moonshots” to seeking out novice knowledge for professional insights, creation and innovation in all sectors of science, business, and life require exceptionally counterintuitive thinking. This kind of thinking just so happens to be the very thought process that underpins ingenious developments in rocket science, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it in your everyday life, too. Law professor and rocket scientist Ozan Varol discusses helpful strategies that will motivate you to thrive in the chaos of the unknown, replace limitations with creativity, rebuild your questions, and fail your way to success.

Humanity thrives on appearances of certainty. But only when people break the sound barrier of their preconceived assumptions, do they actually fly towards true discovery. The philosopher Bertrand Russell and the physicist Richard Feynman both attest to the interminable power of uncertainty, launched by the recognition that people don’t know everything they think they know. Once a person admits this less appealing fact, she will be able to thrive in situations of ambiguity and stumble upon things she would never have dreamed of otherwise.

It seemed to work for Elon Musk. After an early career with PayPal, Musk decided it was time for a change. What else is a multimillionaire to do but turn to one of the most complex industries ever? It was time for a little rocket science. Despite his past accomplishments, his beginnings in the industry involved a lot of wandering around in the dark. The rockets on the market in America and Russia were simply too expensive to tempt Musk, so he decided to take a less certain route instead. He figured he would simply build the rockets from scratch. Musk’s partner and consultant Jim Cantrell noted that the price tag for the machinery was only 2% of what fully-built rockets were selling for. So they decided to venture off the relatively well-worn path of rocket science and bought rocket parts from places like eBay and junkyards. This involved starting with something the author calls “first principles,” as seen in the work of Aristotle. It consists of the process of boiling a problem down to its bare minimum elements in order to step out of the shackles of assumptions and false beliefs. Only through his movement into uncharted realms of rocket science was Musk able to start working on the rockets he desired to create. His methods proved successful, and only 12 years later, SpaceX won a partnership with NASA. Only by questioning the assumptions that rockets were inordinately expensive and only available to government-funded corporations was he able to see through the lie and write a new truth.

People are too accustomed to sticking to the trodden path of illusory stability. This form of “path dependence,” in which people determine their future based upon what they and others have done previously, is not the way to discovery. It’s difficult to shake off internalized limitations, though. Sometimes, it takes a complete rewiring of the brain or the dissolution of a person’s seemingly certain situation. Science entrepreneurs like Musk aren’t the only ones who put this into practice. Frustrated with the conventional joke-telling methods of his time, comedian Steve Martin decided to defy the rule of the punchline and reduce comedy down to its essential element: making people laugh. Martin went on to perform his seemingly absurd standup routines without the aid of the punchline, which he felt conditioned people into laughter rather than producing it outright. And funnily enough, it worked. The audience loved it, and Martin grew exceedingly popular. Then just like Musk, he switched gears. Martin pushed himself back into the unknown and once again, grew successful as an award-winning actor. Musk, Martin, and countless others are proof of the fact that uncertainty is the launching pad for revelation.

If you’re traveling in the dark, don’t panic—the unworn way may be just the thing you need to untether yourself from underlying assumptions and beliefs. Once you grow free to see, this greater clarity allows you to address your problems, dreams, and goals anew.

Follow the lead of MIT and think like a rocket scientist—or, a kindergartener. MIT’s Media Lab is home to a Lifelong Kindergarten program, which consists of a group of people devoted to cultivating the kind of creative, unhinged thinking associated with kids. The animation geniuses at Pixar follow the same principle of unleashing the power of play to inculcate greater creativity too. Pixar employees attend classes during the week on a range of random topics from sculpting to belly dancing. The author encourages readers to polish their creativity by creating room for boredom and unguided curiosity. When animators dip into dance, or scientists partake in play, new discoveries are unearthed. Creating space for boredom and learning to connect various unrelated fields of study yields unprecedented creativity. The author talks about these “idea-in-the-shower” moments in which brilliant solutions or imaginative ideas seem to fall out of the sky. Walks, music, and simply staring off into space ignite the subconscious to develop various ideas that produce a conscious creative innovation—what we all know as that “aha” moment.

Take it from Einstein. As a child, Einstein imagined various thought experiments, allowing his mind to wander and tackle a problem with the use of mental visuals. For instance, the thought experiment that led him to devise his special theory of relativity was developed when he was only 16 years old, simply wondering what would happen if he chased a beam of light all the way to its end. Similarly, he encouraged what he called “combinatory play,” which involved steeping oneself in various interests and interacting with people from different fields and backgrounds. Those who possess no knowledge about a particular field are often best equipped to ask seemingly simple questions and reveal incredible insights. 

In addition to unfettered creative thinking, the author encourages moonshot thinking, which is exactly what it sounds like. Developing all those seemingly insane ideas actually draws more interest from investors and potential employees alike. In order to do this, creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs need both the child-like play of divergent thinking, the process that stimulates ideas, and the more structured mindset of convergent thinking, the process that develops plans to actualize those ideas. Similarly, people can use strategies like backcasting to catapult their ideas further into reality. For instance, Amazon partakes in backcasting through creating press releases for products that don’t yet exist; this enables them to develop a clear vision of success before developing the means to get there. Sometimes, the best way to arrive at success is to go through the backdoor.

Your mind is your mold—don’t let it limit you. Instead, take a walk or put on a record. That next crazy idea you have might be the one that unties you from routine and sets you on the path towards greater creativity, productivity, and maybe even a new invention you always wished existed. Get bored, and take a moonshot in the dark. 

Confirmation bias is embedded in our public discourse. Social media platforms like Facebook make it increasingly difficult for people to realize potential blindspots in their arguments or holes in their beliefs. One thing rocket scientists do (or sometimes don’t do) to avoid the pitfalls of their assumptions is pretty backwards: They try to prove themselves wrong. Einstein embodied this kind of courage in the face of falsity throughout his career-long disputes with colleague Niels Bohr. Both men disagreed about current manifestations of quantum theory, so they developed a consistent rapport in which they contrived thought experiments to prove the other wrong. In seeking their colleague’s falsification, they drew closer to the truth. Jodie Foster’s character in the popular film Contact follows the same practice when she hears the auditory glimmers of life on another planet. Before solidifying her belief that extraterrestrial life really did exist, she rushed back to the lab and asked her colleague to prove her wrong.

When scientists and laypeople alike fail to uncover the faults of their argument, failure is inevitable. The author notes that not even rocket scientists are immune to the pull of confirmation bias. In fact, in 1999 the Mars Exploration Rovers project attempted to put the unmanned Mars Climate Orbiter safely into the orbit of Mars, but the mission failed due to one huge, glaring oversight—one that set NASA back $193 million. Upon the fourth and final trajectory correction maneuver, a testing element put in place to avoid what ultimately came next, the scientists learned that their Orbiter would be dangerously low in Mars’ altitude. Some estimates were even off by 70 kilometers. Still, the scientists upheld their delusion that the spacecraft was fine and believed it would enter into orbit safely. Sadly, those delusions crashed with their spacecraft. To make matters worse, the Jet Propulsion Lab in charge of the mission assumed that the measurements transmitted by the Orbiter were metric units, whereas Lockheed Martin, the group that built the craft, actually used the inch-pound system instead. The initial measurement of 70 kilometers quadrupled in scope. The Orbiter met its unfortunate, freezing end in the cold clutches of Mars.

If people want truth, they must be willing to check, change, and recalibrate their minds. Not expecting failure leads to failure. This is true in every area of life—business, politics, art, and science—every field requires a mind that’s willing to go looking for failure. The key is to look outside yourself. Very few people are able to conceive of their own weaknesses or potential setbacks in their product, plan, or belief system. Find a friend, or a stranger better yet, and allow your ideas to self-destruct.

Society is allergic to failure. Culture squashes the ability of people to look at their failures from an objective viewpoint, then learn from those missteps. In order to be truly creative and innovative in any sphere of life, people must shed their fear of the setback. This inability to incubate failure as an integral part of progress halts improvement and blinds people to their inevitable imperfections. Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets, and it took James Dyson an unimaginable 5,126 tries to get his vacuum right. Success isn’t singular; sometimes it takes a while to get a lot. So be kind to failure, and it will eventually be kind to you.

SpaceX made a careful study of its setbacks in order to reach Earth’s orbit. Usually people assume that if the third time isn’t the charm, then the project’s simply a bust. Despite the three failed launches of SpaceX’s Falcon 1, Musk and his team refused to fold. Instead, they studied what went wrong with the most recent defeat—the first stage of the rocket correctly separated from the second stage, the portion which delivers the spacecraft into orbit, but it continued its ascent, thus bumping into the second stage from behind. This failure should have been SpaceX’s final blunder, but instead they uncovered unforeseen pressure as the underlying cause of the failure and constructed Falcon 1 anew. Just a short time after, on September 28, 2008, Musk gave it another go. The lesson learned through failure helped. Musk’s seemingly crazy creation became the first privately-constructed vessel to transcend the atmosphere. To add fuel to their rocketing success, NASA entered a deal of $1.6 billion for SpaceX to handle trips to the International Space Station. If they’d stopped at failure number three, or attributed their pitfalls to forces beyond their control, SpaceX would have missed both a lucrative deal with NASA and a record-breaking achievement.

Of course, one must think like a rocket scientist in order to draw helpful conclusions from otherwise paralyzing mishaps. The author uses a term from Duke business professor Sim Sitkin to define these kinds of winning blunders—“intelligent failures.” Such failures occur in unprecedented territories and therefore require a mindset that’s open to massive missteps. The key is to learn from these, and as the author says, learn quickly. But still, continuous learning and eventual success doesn’t mean that failure goes away. It’s a constant component of any company, creative process, or business plan. The author advises that to make failing more interesting, people should harness greater curiosity towards the substance of their mistakes. Additionally, enjoying the “input” regardless of the resulting “output” is a big step in withstanding imperfection. If you’re writing a book or enhancing a new product, you should enjoy the process of writing or constructing even if the venture turns out to be a flop. 

Take a page from NASA’s book—literally. To promote drawing conclusions from past failures, NASA logs their mistakes in a book called “Flight Rules.” Similarly, SpaceX proves that maybe the third time isn’t the charm. Maybe it’s the fourth or the fifth. Rocket science makes it simple: The freedom to fail breeds the curiosity to learn and the ability to succeed. So think about it: When was your last failure? What did you learn?

NASA’s Apollo missions were truly groundbreaking. They landed humans on the moon—what could go wrong with a reality-shifting breakthrough like that? Unfortunately, success got to NASA’s head. While their quality assurance staff was stocked with a necessary 1,700 people in 1970, this number fell to an insufficient 505 people in 1986. The author notes that NASA’s achievements tricked them into viewing spaceflight as a standard human experience rather than a dangerous adventure. In the same year they decreased security measures, a tragedy occured. NASA’s Challenger spacecraft burst into an orb of smoke and flames due to a tiny though significant machinery malfunction they were warned about long before the launch. In 2003, NASA met another achievement-induced failure when the space shuttle Columbia dissolved upon returning to Earth. Again, NASA superiors failed to heed the warnings of one of its employees who foresaw a potential threat from the start. They buckled under the weight of their accomplishments, falling for the trap that previous success eliminates future failure. And in both cases, people died.

The author notes that each failed mission brought about temporary changes for NASA but failed to address the gaping hole in their system—namely, their inability to shed obedience to a predetermined set of rules. The superiors didn’t adhere to the pleas of caution from the two whistle-blowers due to their allegiance to an established method of procedure. They figured that this way worked in the past, so why shouldn’t it work again? A comfortable, self-satisfied mindset is destructive to progress, and in rocket science, it poses a huge danger to life itself. Repairing surface mistakes doesn’t fix the underlying root of the issue; if anything, it prolongs the problem and exacerbates its impact. 

A better way to befriend the enemy of success is to pretend like that success doesn’t even exist. That’s what CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings did. Reed isn’t a rocket scientist, but he definitely thinks like one. Instead of basking in the success of his DVD delivery business model, he anticipated a future failing and shifted his business to a streaming service instead. When you act like you’re behind rather than ahead, failing instead of achieving, you empower yourself to stay sharp and anticipate the market’s next move. Ironically, a mindset that refuses to accept victory as an ending actually garners more success in the long run. Next time you win, act like you didn’t and win some more.

Traversing the red craters of Mars might not be in your future, but you can at least tilt your gaze to the moon and the stars; maybe in the field of lights, you can even pick out Venus. When you do, remember that the way you think, the thought process you decide to follow, becomes what you achieve and who you craft yourself to be.