The Best Mental Models

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.

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.

Rather 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

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.

It’s crucial for us to understand as many mental models as possible. As the adage goes, a little knowledge can be dangerous and creates more problems than total ignorance. No single model is universally applicable – we find exceptions for nearly everything. Even hardcore physics has not been totally solved.