The key ideas

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: The Workbook

Ozan Varol, 2020

Why were two Mars rovers better than one? This is Ozan Varol's companion workbook to his book Think Like a Rocket Scientist: nine principles and exercises for each one. This retelling will help you take one task of your own through the questions rocket scientists ask, from the fear of the unknown to taking apart a failure and a success.

Who it is for

For anyone facing a big task: a career change, a product launch, an important job interview. And for teams that are tired of doing things “the way we always have”.

It's better to be uncomfortably uncertain than comfortably wrong.

A Workbook Where the Main Task Is Yours

Picture a task that has been hanging over you for a long time: a career change, a product launch or a conversation you keep putting off. Usually people tackle such a task at random: they look for a ready answer, do what everyone else does and hope to get lucky.

Ozan Varol offers another way: to think about your task the way rocket scientists think about a flight. What you have in front of you is not his big book but the workbook that goes with it. The workbook has nine principles, and each one comes with short key points and exercises. The exercises are meant to be done on your own task. There are almost no stories or details in the workbook: it is written for someone who reads and gets straight to work.

That is why this retelling is built the same way. Each chapter has a principle, an explanation of why, in Varol's view, it works, and questions worth asking yourself.

Choose one task right now and keep it in mind to the end. Let's start with what frightens us most: the unknown.

A Fear Worth Putting on Paper

We look for certainty where there is none, and for one right answer where there are several. In Varol's view, what stands in the way of discovery is not ignorance but the illusion that the answer is already known. As long as everything seems clear, you simply don't notice anything new.

The unknown is like a dark room. It's frightening to walk in, but most such rooms have a door that opens both ways: if you don't like what you find, you can walk out.

To make the fear smaller, Varol advises answering a few questions in writing. What exactly am I afraid of? What is the worst outcome, and how likely is it, given what I know now? What is the best outcome, and how likely is that one? On paper, a fear often turns out smaller than the feeling of the unknown itself.

After that, rocket scientists do two things. The first is redundancy: a backup that works independently of the main system, like a spare tire. Ask yourself what would happen if a valuable employee or an important client left, or if your family lost one of its incomes. But past a certain point, extra backups only add complexity and cost.

The second is a margin of safety: a decision is made sturdier than seems necessary. The higher the cost of a mistake, the bigger the margin. Especially if the decision is like a door you can't walk back through.

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About the author

Ozan Varol is the author of Think Like a Rocket Scientist and of this companion workbook. He gives talks on his principles to companies in a wide range of industries.

All books by this author: Ozan Varol

Terms from the book

  • Margin of safety
  • Sunk-cost fallacy
  • Premortem
  • Redundancy: A backup that works independently of the main system, so that the failure of one part doesn't doom the whole project. In the workbook it is one of the two ways rocket scientists deal with uncertainty.
  • Invisible rules: Varol's name for habits that have quietly hardened into unwritten law, even though the problem they were created for is long gone.
  • First-principles thinking: A way of thinking in which you set aside the familiar ideas, your own and other people's, about how things should be done, and break the task down into its simplest parts so you can assemble the solution anew.
  • Incubation: A period when you have been thinking about a task for a long time, the solution still hasn't come, and the work seems to have stalled. Varol cites research showing that this time helps people solve problems.
  • Moonshot: Literally, a shot at the Moon. Varol's name for a goal of improving something not by a few percent but tenfold.
  • Strategy and tactics: A strategy is a plan for reaching a goal. The workbook distinguishes it from tactics, the concrete actions by which that plan is carried out.
  • Working hypothesis: An assumption that is treated as true until a test disproves it. Varol advises calling your opinions by this name, so that it is easier to test them than to defend them.
  • Zander: Ros and Ben Zander, the authors of the book The Art of Possibility. Varol borrows the “How fascinating!” exercise from it.
  • Near miss: An aviation term: a collision could have happened but didn't, simply by luck. Varol advises examining such cases as closely as accidents.

All terms

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