The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

For instance, many companies feel the need to jump on every new trend within their market to capitalize on the attention of their customers. This results in a hamster wheel of new tweaks, rather than companies focusing on building timeless products and services.

One of the drawbacks of hierarchies is the lack of perceived value of those who are at the bottom. “An efficient new gathering strategy devised by a low-ranking chimpanzee, for example, might not get replicated just because of her status in society.”3 Hierarchies in the human world act as information filters causing us to potentially miss opportuni

The entropy of the universe only increases with time. One of the impacts of this law is that we need to expend energy to create order. Without the deployment of energy, all things move away from order.

In chemistry, activation energy is the energy that must be delivered to a chemical system in order to initiate a reaction, breaking bonds so that new ones can form.

To overcome resistance, we often default to using more force when simply reducing the friction or viscosity will do. Doing both is more effective than either in isolation.

This is why having a direction is so important: it lets us evaluate the usefulness of what we are doing by giving us a measurement of where we want to go.

« Adaptation requires leaving or being forced from your comfort zone and into a place where you observe and experience new threats to your security. » Rafe

Self-preservation is such a useful model because it helps us understand seemingly counterintuitive actions: sacrificing short-term guarantees for long-term possibilities, like the animals we looked at who sacrifice themselves for their offspring or their group.

She knew the direction she was headed and made decisions to increase her velocity in that direction.