The Best Mental Models

Species tend to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, given the combination of their genetics and their environment – an always-unavoidable combination. However, adaptations made in an individual’s lifetime are not passed down genetically, as was once thought: Populations of species adapt through the process of evolution by natural selec... See more

At its core, Occam’s Razor is a principle that suggests that when faced with competing explanations for an event or occurrence, you should select the explanation that makes the fewest number of assumptions.

“Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backwards. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there?

"Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead–through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid t... See more

Rather than focusing on having a brilliant day, why not consider what a crap day would look like and avoid that? It will likely be easier and will achieve similar results. Or, as Charles Munger pointed out: "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very... See more

You may have noticed  students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they  fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in  your head.  What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models—  because if you just have one or tw... See more

This is what mental models are: ideas from diverse fields that can aid your life. In this sense, improving vocabulary is a meta mental model. It’s a way of finding and organising new mental models.

If you don't have the underlying experience, then it just reads like a collection of quotes. It's cool, it's inspirational for a moment, maybe you'll make a nice poster out of it. But then you forget it and move on. Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge. 

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.