The Best Mental Models

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.

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.

People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.