The Best Mental Models

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. 

You may have noticed  students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they  fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in  your head.  What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models—  because if you just have one or two that you're using, the... 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.

A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”

First principles thinking is a fancy way of saying “think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we... See more