The Great Mental Models

When you learn to see the world as it is, and not as you want it to be, everything changes.

I went from theoretical examples that were completely divorced from the real world, to the wisdom behind the achievements of one of the most successful businessmen of all time.

latticework of mental models. These are chunks of knowledge from different disciplines that can be simplified and applied to better understand the world.

The pursuit of understanding fuels meaning and adaptation,

Understanding only becomes useful when we adjust our behavior and actions accordingly.

We optimize for short-term ego protection over long-term happiness.

Gravity diminishes with distance, and so too does your propensity to make an impulse buy.

Sometimes making good decisions boils down to avoiding bad ones.

Only by repeated testing of our models against reality and being open to feedback can we update our understanding of the world and change our thinking.

Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinary mindset that we need to accurately see a problem.

the key to sample sizes is to look for them not just over space, but over time. You need to reach back into the past as far as you can to contribute to your sample. We have a tendency to think that how the world is, is how it always was. And so we get caught up validating our assumptions from what we find in the here and now.

The world does not isolate itself into discrete disciplines. We only break it down that way because it makes it easier to study it.

What successful people do is file away a massive, but finite, amount of fundamental, established, essentially unchanging knowledge that can be used in evaluating the infinite number of unique scenarios which show up in the real world.

The more you use them, the more you will be able to build the knowledge of indicators that can trigger the use of the most appropriate model. Using and failing, as long as you acknowledge, reflect, and learn from it, is also how you build your repertoire. You need to be deliberate about choosing the models you will use in a situation. As you use them, a great practice is to record and reflect.

Mental models are not an excuse to create a lengthy decision process but rather to help you move away from seeing things the way you think they should be to the way they are.

Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of what they represent.

if the aim becomes simplification rather than understanding we start to make bad decisions.

a cautionary tale of what can happen when faith in the model influences the decisions we make in the territory. When we try to fit complexity into the simplification.

in using maps, abstractions, and models, we must always be wise to their limitations.

Maps, or models, are necessary but necessarily flawed.

When ego and not competence drives what we undertake, we have blind spots. If you know what you understand, you know where you have an edge over others. When you are honest about where your knowledge is lacking you know where you are vulnerable and where you can improve. Understanding your circle of competence improves decision-making and outcomes.

One of the essential requirements of a circle of competence is that you can never take it for granted. You can’t operate as if a circle of competence is a static thing, that once attained is attained for life. The world is dynamic. Knowledge gets updated, and so too must your circle.

Learning comes when experience meets reflection.

a good theory must have an element of risk to it—namely, it has to risk being wrong.

Trend is not destiny.

First principles thinking doesn’t have to be quite so grand. When we do it, we aren’t necessarily looking for absolute truths.

knowledge can only be built when we are actively trying to falsify it

If we never learn to take something apart, test our assumptions about it, and reconstruct it, we end up bound by what other people tell us—trapped in the way things have always been done.

everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are bitcoin. So is love.

If your “whys” result in a statement of falsifiable fact, you have hit a first principle. If they end up with a “because I said so” or ”it just is”, you know you have landed on an assumption that may be based on popular opinion, cultural myth, or dogma. These are not first principles.

The real power of first principles thinking is moving away from random change and into choices that have a real possibility of success.

the act of detailing out the choices we would make in these alternate realities that have otherwise similar properties to our current one, doing the thought experiment, is what leads to insights regarding what we value in life and where to focus our energies.

Sometimes it is easy to imagine ten different ways a situation could have played out differently, but more of a stretch to change the variables and still end up with the same thing.

We either will get hit by lightning today or we won’t. The problem is, we just don’t know until we live out the day.

“upside optionality”, that is, seeking out situations that we expect have good odds of offering us opportunities.

Those who are not afraid to fail (properly) have a huge advantage over the rest. What they learn makes them less vulnerable to the volatility of the world. They benefit from it, in true antifragile fashion.

Intelligence is not evidence.

Successfully thinking in shades of probability means roughly identifying what matters, coming up with a sense of the odds, doing a check on our assumptions, and then making a decision.

Inversion is a powerful tool to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove obstacles to success.

As a thinking tool it means approaching a situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point.

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

Instead of aiming directly for your goal, think deeply about what you want to avoid and then see what options are left over.

inversion is a staple of mathematical, philosophical, and scientific inquiry.

He hit an impasse, realizing that he’d never be able to definitely solve the problem by thinking forward.

By starting with the logical outcome of his assumptions and seeking to validate those, he advances his case with significantly more efficiency and accuracy than if he had searched first for proof of the assumptions themselves.

Although the campaign utilized more principles than just inversion, it was the original decision to invert the approach that provided the framework from which the campaign was created and executed.

he thought about what the world would look like if women smoked often and anywhere, and then set about trying to make that world a reality.

What are you trying to avoid? Instead of thinking through the achievement of a positive outcome, we could ask ourselves how we might achieve a terrible outcome, and let that guide our decision-making.

not getting rich, but avoiding being poor.

Whatever angle you choose to approach your problem from, you need to then follow with consideration of the opposite angle. Think about not only what you could do to solve a problem, but what you could do to make it worse—and then avoid doing that, or eliminate the conditions that perpetuate it.

Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones.

Simplicity can increase efficiency

unnecessary complexity just papers over the systemic flaws that will eventually choke us.

Hanlon’s Razor states that we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity.

look for options instead of missing opportunities.

bank teller. They called it the “Fallacy

Failing to prioritize stupidity over malice causes things like paranoia. Always assuming malice puts you at the center of everyone else’s world. This is an incredibly self-centered approach to life. In reality, for every act of malice, there is almost certainly far more ignorance, stupidity, and laziness.

of all possible motives behind an action, the ones that require the least amount of energy to execute (such as ignorance or laziness) are more likely to occur than one that requires active malice.