The Best Mental Models

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)

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

Species tend to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, given the combination of their genetics and their environment – an always-unavoidable combination. However, adaptations made in an individual’s lifetime are not passed down genetically, as was once thought: Populations of species adapt through the process of evolution by natural selec... See more

Farnam Street • Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)

The Red Queen Effect

The map is not the territory is a mental model that reminds us not to confuse a model of a situation with the situation itself.

Your Innovator’s Toolkit: The map is not the territory

“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 t... See more

Inversion

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 absol... See more

jamesclear.com • First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself

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 tw... See more

Charlie Munger • A Lesson On Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business – Charles Munger, USC Business School, 1994

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.