THINK LIKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST

Varol’s polymathic background—rocket scientist, law professor, public speaker—makes him an engaging guide for this book, which cannily blends memoir, pop science, and self-help manual. Many of his insights come directly from his experience working on the team that successfully landed two rovers on Mars in 2003. For instance, the plan to send two rovers instead of one speaks to the need for redundancies in a process; the use of inflatable balloons to land the rovers spotlights how effective solutions require escaping we’ve-always-done-it-this-way mindsets. Throughout, the book is peppered with counterintuitive but sensible commentaries about working with teams, testing rigorously, and embracing failures. “We must expose ourselves to failure regularly,” he writes. “Each crisis becomes training for the next one.” Varol thoughtfully selects his anecdotes from outside his own experience, with a mind toward showing how even the brightest scientists can slip into complacency. The Challenger and Columbia disasters, for instance, revealed how engineers dismissed sustained evidence of problems as mere data points. In a way, the author is almost too good at his job; he so effectively relates space-program history that his comments about how it can provide help for your business feel modest and tacked-on. He also discusses the private rocketry work of Elon Musk with an enthusiasm that borders on hagiography. On the whole, the book is an effective and good-natured effort to remind readers that everybody has mental ruts and would do well to escape them with the help of other people, even made-up ones: “Build a mental model of your favorite adversary, and have imaginary conversations with them,” suggests the author. Talking to yourself never sounded so sane.

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