The Best Mental Models
Incentives are what drive human behavior. If you want to change the way people behave, think about changing their incentives. Most people look at the function utility instead of the emotional benefit. What’s the real human motivation for expensive headphones is not to hear better but for reputation and status
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.
Occam's Razor: The Atomic Mental Model - Sketchy Ideas %
Reasoning by analogy, or copying what others are doing, is sort of like being a cover band where you’re playing somebody else’s music. Whereas with first-principles thinking, you go back to the fundamental raw materials of music, which are the notes, and then you build an original song from scratch. That is first-principles thinking.
Lenny Rachitsky • First-Principles Thinking
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... See more
Farnam Street • Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)
The Red Queen Effect
Storytelling: A tremendously useful tool to increase the longevity of your message in the audience’s mind. Stories spark emotions. People use stories to make sense of things. People learn from stories.
The First Principles Method Explained by Elon Musk
youtu.beRather 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
Inversion
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.
Neil Kakkar • Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model
Moat:
“An intrinsic characteristic that gives the business a durable competitive advantage” - Munger