What the movie “The Martian” can teach us about achieving our goals

“The Martian” is a sci-fi book from author Andy Weir. It’s one of my favourite audiobooks, so if you haven’t seen the movie, listened to the audio or read the book, then I recommend you to go and do that first before reading this post, as there’ll be lots of spoilers.

The story is about Mark Watney, a NASA botanist and engineer, who becomes stranded on Mars after his crew thinks he died during a fierce storm and blasted off for Earth without him. Alone on Mars, with all communication equipment damaged and only a meagre amount of supplies, Mark is confronted with what seems like impossible odds.

I remember listening to it many years back and thinking – there’s a lot to be learnt from Mark’s approach to tackling a large problem – and the spirit and focus to never give up. Whilst hopefully we’ll never be in a situation as dire as his, we might have large dreams that seem out of our reach – or difficult problems that are too hard to solve. That there must be some systematic approach to tackling them.

In the movie, after the storm clears, Mark makes a video blog, where he assesses his situation and realises that

He’s alive, but he can’t contact Earth or his fellow astronauts.
He has a year’s worth of food, but the next planned mission is in four years.

Mark then begins by focusing on his most important problem, which is having enough food to survive. And starts planning ways to solve this. He only has one year of food, which means he’ll need to create another three years worth.

He calculates that he can use the Mars hab and tents – to grow food. And whilst small, if he maximises the space it would be enough for 3 years of crop. Now he’ll just need to find cropable soil, water, and something eatable to grow. But his larger single problem – has now been broken into three smaller problems.

Problem number 1 – Something edible to grow

Mark was lucky that NASA had packed a few whole potatoes that the crew was going to eat for Thanksgiving Day. He instead plans to cut them up into small pieces and plant each, which will grow into full-size potatoes. He can then eat some – and cut the remaining into pieces – and again repeat the process.

Problem number 2 – Cropable Soil

With his botany background, Mark knows that Martian soil, unlike Earth soil, doesn’t have the bacteria nor nutrients to grow anything. He has a bit of earth soil with him but not enough to farm with. To solve this problem, he uses his faeces as manure and places it on the Martian soil – and then sprinkles a bit of earth soil over the top – to infect it. The earth soil contains dozens of different species of bacteria, which should grow and spread into the Martian soil – and make it cropable.

Problem number 3 – Water.. and lots of it

Mark knows that water is H2O, hydrogen and oxygen, and if he can find enough of those elements, he can make water by burning them together. So this single problem is again broken down into two smaller problems: finding Hydrogen and Oxygen.

Problem 3A – Where to get Hydrogen?

The previous flight had left a lot of rocket fuel. And rocket fuel contains hydrazine. Mark again uses his chemistry knowledge to split hydrazine up into nitrogen and hydrogen, and calculates he can generate enough hydrogen for about 600 litres of water. Enough for his 3 years worth of crop.

Problem 3B – Oxygen

Mars’s atmosphere, whilst thin, is 95% CO2. And he happens to have a machine, called the Oxygenator, whose sole purpose – is to break up the oxygen from CO2. Yaaaeeeeh!

There is quite a lot of science in the movie, and I recommend you read up on it more if you’re interested in any parts, and also I’m not sure if I got it all correct. But the main outtake is that – Mark was able to break up the complex problem – into smaller and smaller problems – until it was something he was able to solve. And combined with his relentless refusal to quit, he was able to overcome a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

This approach is quite common in engineering and science, to solve difficult problems or tackle large scale projects. But we can apply the same principle to many things in our personal lives, that we think are too difficult, or too big to do.

Example

Let’s say your aim is to retire in 10 years with $50K a year in passive income. Seems like a far fetch target, especially if you currently have no investments or passive income.

Well, you can take a step back and assess your situation. You might be lucky to have a stable job, and realise that if you cut down on your expenses and luxury items, you can save $20K a year. And with the discipline to not spend it, after 10 years you’ll have $200K. If you invest that into a dividend stock with 5% return, you can generate $10K a year. So now you just need to find another $40K a year.

You could consider using your extra time to create a second stream of income by posting youtube videos. But generating $40K a year through youtube is a mammoth task, so again we can break it down further and focus on generating $5K a year first. And then later find ways to increase it to $10K, $20K and then finally $40K. $5K a year means about $416 a month. Perhaps uploading 4 videos a month with enough views, can earn that amount. In which case your first actionable task is to start creating a youtube video, and researching how to get 10K views. There are of course many other methods you could use to generate that $5K a year, including property investment, writing books, selling products etc.

By breaking up difficult problems into smaller subproblems that are within your resources to solve, any big problem might not seem so large anymore. Also If you draw up the dependencies between the problem, it can give you a plan to reach the final goal. You might find in the end you’ll need to accomplish dozens and dozens of smaller tasks before reaching it. But nothing worth having comes easy, so stay focused. And combined with strong habits there’s nothing that’s out of your reach.