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

Lindy Effect: "If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years.”

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.

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.