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Spacecraft Design Teaches us Life & Business Lessons

1,154 views Wait, is this logic right? • Sep 08, 2023
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Slog Reference: Laws of Spacecraft Design

Description

A professor of Aerospace Engineering posted an article that mentions 40 laws for spacecraft design. People soon found out that these were applicable in other areas of life too. So, what are these laws that can help you navigate better through the world and maybe help you gain some insights, rules or guiding points in life? Let's find out these 40 Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design.

More videos for you:
Understand power law: https://youtu.be/i2YrICwDR5g
Goodhart's law: https://youtu.be/OU5W-b_e8a4

The article: https://blog.matt-rickard.com/p/akins-laws-of-spacecraft-design

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Transcript

this list was created by Professor David Aiken a professor of aerospace engineering at MIT Boston and Maryland he's been designing spacecraft for over 30 years okay and he came up with this list of laws saying that if you don't follow these laws your spacecraft will crash okay okay and the list is so interesting that in that you find so many of those laws are applicable in our day-to-day lives even though we are not designing Chris Craft yeah I saw the list and I was fascinated how much of that applied to me in my day-to-day life correct so just to get an idea of how broadly it is applicable what we did was we circulated this list in the office
and we asked people if there were laws in there that they found were very interesting and applicable and each one has picked one law that they really loved and they're going to have a chat with them yes so let's uh bring in uh people one by one who's first anchor so which are your favorite laws so of course the all-time favorite is there has to be always a clear line of blame but let me read you the two I chose yeah uh number 33 on the list patterns law of program planning a good plan violently executed Now is better than a perfect plan next week which is exactly what your T-shirt yeah sweatshirts is startups now uh credit to
Head Start uh number 37 which I think I've been taking very personally recently is henshaw's law one key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame and I think this works very well and one may um mistake this for uh getting work done from non-performers but the way I think about it yeah uh even otherwise brilliant people and I will include both of us generously on that list yes uh I found uh do much better when there are clear lines of blame which also brings me to a thought yeah that I think people rise to the platform that they are given yeah they are not made for something yeah but once they have an opportunity
which shows up which requires them to grow they grow and one fundamental engine of fire behind that is a clear line of blame that now I have to deliver this now I have to do this correct as in what you are saying is that when the success of something yeah is going to give you the credit but the failure is also going to sit at your door you have much more invested in it you put much more uh into it you have more skin in the game right yes so and that is why having diffuse a blame ah means that everybody says it is somebody else's problem and it becomes that little bit easier to say okay what if I do not do
not do it right that goes away when you know that it's explicit to everyone that it's your neck on the line right then you better as in you you have that there is isn't you have to rise up to the occasion then you have to make it happen and I have seen that happening across the board be it home be it uh not leaving a wet towel on the bed while leaving the home getting something done delivered to a client or getting something which is uh you know there are many actions which if you do not take yeah there's no immediate failure which can be seen correct yeah and a lot of times at work
um there needs to be things which are lined up in such a way that this input has to go in irrespective of clear output being measured correct and that input uh how do you else do you enforce it if there is no nuclear lines okay so I've been realizing that right uh maybe it's sort of changing how I think about everything there has to be a clear line of blame for everyone doing everything there's no such thing as group responsibility there is all individual responsibilities that's why I guess if you have a question asking it on a WhatsApp group might not get your answers but sending it to ankur will get you an answer because ankur knows that
nobody else is going to answer it oh so of course there is this of course uh what is it called the bystander effect yes it kicks in as well but we'll probably not go there I was trying not to go there because it turns out that that was a very bad research and really misreported by New York Times but before oh God I need to go and lead them into another episode on that some other day but but but uh this thing I often do this yeah I take the same text it's not structured light it's like it's being sent to a large number of people yeah it's like can you tell me about this
what do you think about this yeah and yesterday just yesterday night I did this I send it to four people yeah asking them should I buy these Fancy Pants yeah right and if so where will I wear it yeah unfortunately for me two of them said yes two oxen said and said no well I might still buy it though next time I'll probably show up in those are cool okay great all right great thank you ankur thank you what is your law so very interesting I mean full disclosure I did I did study aerospace engineering so I don't know how good am I for a video like this because a lot of these laws I mean you
won't believe our professors literally would speak to us day in day out oh okay interestingly until the point of this video where I had to come and express some of them yeah I did not really think about them in certain ways that I have now which is why the one that I picked was that you have to see something either three times or teach it once huh in order to really get it right yes the first time we just over it we just as good absolutely and and some of this is also coming from coming from where you know we say that you have to see something like seven times a potential customer has to see
something seven times in order to kind of register the product uh I have a very similar experience of having done this during my Aerospace as a subject when I was studying so aerodynamics and stability and control yeah two subjects which everyone thinks are the toughest yeah so the easiest way to do in engineering is you oh yes right it looks like you're trying to teach the professor exactly yeah like go go on explain uh what is CM Alpha for example right so very technical term and you're suddenly like this used to sound very right in my head what is coming out of my mouth absolute trash yeah right and that is that is where we actually
got into this habit of you know can we go and teach this absolutely once one very important reason I started this channel is because you know I mean I'm basically teaching we are teaching right and uh it helps me understand that is my primary motivation if you guys learn that's just a secondary bonus I don't care about you guys absolutely very well said and uh you know and of course there's another favorite of mine which I would not want to leave without saying which is the last point that in space there is no room for error there's absolutely no room for uh for failure you know yes it's something that has been very close uh to me also personally
a lot of people you know take it in a very negative connotations that you don't have space to make a mistake in life right right that is not what it is it is if you are at a very very crucial juncture yeah you could go left or right you know if you remember the formula one uh final race where Hamilton lost right couldn't you you just can't make so there are some mistakes that you're not allowed in space that way is a variant no I think the important point to note there is that when you know that of mistake is going to result in people dying absolutely you know billion dollar spacecraft blowing up then you are far
more careful yes and uh I mean just that uh Marathi people would be familiar with the example of tanaji uh right when they were losing a battle on siargad IV and he cut off the ropes that they could use to escape yeah and now they know that there is no chance for failure any failure here is going to mean death absolutely and so they fought much better and they won and that's the same kind of focusing uh that this brings to the table and you should similar things can be done in real life also you can make yourself do it a very recent example of you know this is the the entire Max episode which happened with
Boeing aircraft going down I mean it is Unthinkable happening today it has said that you're more likely to die on your way to the airport than die on a plane crash exactly 350 people died yes right they say that okay you can't blame one person it's a Swiss Cheese model which is essentially always called in aviation but that's not true here it was it was that one mistake you were not allowed to make if that wouldn't have happened those people so yeah catastrophic example but that's my take all right thank you arpit thank you welcome makash Akash is our operations manager by the way so what is your favorite law uh my favorite is 28th law which is uh
something like a bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually a good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately right so basically if you have good content but a bad presentation right you're going to feel right away because nobody is ever going to even look at your content right so give an example of that uh being dishonest or lying is a good example but if we have to draw parallels with it a job interview or a candidate selection can be a better one right so I mean if there is a candidate who really knows his or her stuff right but they are not good at talking they are not going to get a
chance right they're going to get rejected in the first five minutes because the interviewer isn't even going to try to poke and find out how good they are at whatever programming or editing or whatever right whereas the reverse ah is not true right so I mean reverse is kind of true in the sense that if you don't know your stuff but you are great at presentation you might succeed for a little while but eventually you will fail but the important thing to keep in mind is no matter I mean one of the problems a lot of us uh Indians have is that we think of presentation and communication skills as not very important and we think if
our core is good then the rest of it doesn't matter but the point is it really really matters yeah yeah you need to break the barrier first and then you can approve your skills correct you don't get a chance to prove your skills if you don't have the presentation layer the soft skills right right yeah thanks Akash thank you hey welcome back srikanth thank you thank you so much better those guys who are boring okay sure I believe you is that one of the laws what's your favorite uh I have a lot of favorites actually uh one of them is number 10 which is when in doubt estimate uh in an emergency guess but be
sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along very self-explanatory you give it a little bit thought but you will immediately understand what it means it's my favorite yeah ultimate favorite is number 40 yeah which is muck Brian's law yeah and listen to this you can't make it better until you make it work it is such a simple line and such a mind-blowing line I can't begin to tell you and this is something that we do inherently but we don't realize the importance of it yes like uh suppose I'm editing an audio piece yeah I have to have a rough draft of it before I can make it better yeah until I have the
foundation I can't really improve upon it yes I love it yeah no I think uh you're making it sound easy right A lot of people are not able to do this at all I mean they have some idea in their head of what a perfect article looks like or what a perfect audio piece looks like or whatever it is that they want to do and because they don't know how to make that perfect thing then never get started perfect is the enemy of good perfect is the enemy of good and forget good I mean just even a bad thing right it is so much easier to fix a bad thing after you have created it than to create a good
one from the beginning and so many people would produce so much better stuff yeah if they were to just first you know let us make a bad one then let us improve one example from one of our previous episodes is of pottery class okay the Prof made half the class say that you know spend all your time learning skills designing the perfect part and make one perfect pot in the end yes and the other was told just make as many stupid bad pots as you want yes guess who made the better pot by the end and the people who are allowed to make as many bad parts exactly because they made a bad one then
they improved it then they improved it then they improved it whereas the perfect guys never really got started yes they got started and then they made a bad one in there and the Improvement is actually a natural consequence of doing it multiple times because you can't help but improve okay it's the only way forward yeah you can't become successively progressively worse at something exactly so I love it I um I truly truly uh enjoyed all of these laws in fact I wish I could speak about every single absolutely that is true there is a link there I think each one of you should go and read the whole thing in detail they should they should
post their favorite in the comments oh yeah post your favorite in the comments and give an example which is not related to spacecraft yeah right uh but what I really find interesting is that you know at the top level this sounds like a LinkedIn Gyan episode 30 things to learn from 40 laws of spacecraft design but the reality is so much more deeper than an average LinkedIn article right yeah these are really good that is what I like about it and that's why I when we sent it out to all these people the response we got was phenomenal they said oh my God these are really good yeah yeah so and take a look if you do come across a LinkedIn article
that speaks about real life gan from laws of spacecraft design tag this episode tag this video into that comment section and let's have some fun I love trolling people but uh I I wanted to ask you do you have a favorite law out of these what I do right so I want to go with number two to design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort that is why it is a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong meaning that don't you can't make a perfect design yeah you cannot make a thing where something isn't going to go wrong yeah so instead build something which you try very hard that nothing
should go wrong but also in addition if something goes wrong you should have uh backup plans to deal with it and a great example of this comes from my brother who had just joined a very Tech focused uh hardware company okay and the ten guys there were very unhappy about one particular uh component which would occasionally fail at the customer location and they were trying very hard to figure out why does it fail and how can we just prevent it from failing and they were just going around in circles and my brother who had more of a customer and sales focused background he said you know what forget stop trying to do this it is
taking too much time just add an extra module there saying when this goes wrong detect it and restart right and the customers were so happy with that yeah I mean they don't even realize that a problem happened right so yeah because the tech guys were trying to be perfect with the entire module whereas actually what was needed in the field was basically a way to bypass it overcome it or you know make a corrective action when that happens that's essentially what is needed as long as no important lives data money is lost and there's a way to overcome it do it just do it and this this applies to you in everyday life also absolutely absolutely yeah so
um go ahead at least another 15 laws in there which apply to your life that you should check out more than 15 I mean my law was number 40 and I remember there being more laws after that and of course 39 laws before that so go check out those and let us know what your favorite is in the comments and do let us know how you see it being applicable in your day-to-day life right this was fun this was lots of fun you should do some more of these but later probably srikanth Navi thank you future IQ thank you for watching till the end if you liked this episode check out these others you might
like them also and please share with your friends I'm sure they will also like these