Think Like a Rocket Scientist

I've read this book before.

You've probably read most of this book before too.

I obviously don't mean literally, but it's a shuffled version of case studies and clever business stories from a half dozen better written books. Apart from the author's first-hand accounts of working in the industry, I'm not sure anything I came across in this book was new to me. A lot of it was fairly dumbed down too, which I'm sure was meant to increase mass market appeal but, if anything, decreased my confidence in what was being relayed.

DNF, got 30% of the way through the audio book.

Like much of the self help literature, heavily reliant on anecdotes (not even interesting ones - the common ones like Jobs, Musk, etc) without accounting for survivorship bias.

I did see some interesting ideas about redundancy and reliability that overlap with my own field (software), but I think I'd better off just reading about those topics directly, instead of a watered-down popular treatment.

The best idea I'll take away from this book is the concept of adversarial thought experiments. Ask how you can make your system fail, or imagine being your boss and try to build a case for why he should not promote you. This kind of perspective taking is reminiscent of Superforecasters by Tetlock.