The Best Mental Models

The Circle of Competence is a mental model that involves developing a knowledge of what specific areas an individual has an understanding of or experience in. Everyone has built up useful knowledge in some area of the world. By realizing where your strengths lie, you can determine the areas where you have very little familiarity and avoid them to... See more

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.

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.