The Best Mental Models
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.
Henry L. Roediger III • Make It Stick
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
What is the Circle of Competence and How Do You Find Yours? | MyWallSt
“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... See more
"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... See more
Inversion
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
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.
Farnam Street • Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)
