Q. What are mental models?
A. blueprints to draw your attention to problem at hand, it defines context, background and direction. Helps you make optimal decision.
- provides predictable results of future. life heuristics or guidelines to evaluate or comprehend.
- mental models should come from various discipline, as wisdom of the world cannot be confound to one academic department
- the more tools you are familiar with the better you can handle different situations
1. Decision Making for Speed and Context
Mental Model 1: Address Important, Ignore Urgent
Use to separate true priorities from imposters
- Important Tasks: contribute directly to short/long term goals, core to our work, responsibilities, bottom line. Might appear to not be done immediately, hence procrastination.
- Urgent Tasks: demand immediacy and speed, comes from other people, creates a reaction on your end to that can deviate you from important. Makes you feel quasi-productive. Can be delayed, delegated, or ignored.
- Use DO, SCHEDULE, DELEGATE, ELIMINATE
Mental Model 2: Visualize the Dominoes
- Also known as Second Order Thinking
- E.g. in a beauty competition, if you have to pick who is going to be the most popular, don’t pick the prettiest girl in your opinion, but think what an average person is going to pick as the most pretty. This one step back is called Second Order Thinking.
- Makes you forsee beyond obvious, makes you visionary, futuristic, able to make projections
- Makes you think what everyone else is thinking rather than focussing on what you are thinking
Mental Model 3: Make Reversible Decisions
- Type 1 decisions are irreversible, monumental decisions one cannot take back
- Type 2 decisions are reversible
- As org becomes larger, there is a tendency to take Type 1 decision even in place of Type 2
- Type 1 decision making causes slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, consequently diminish invention
Mental Model 4: Seek Satisfiction or Law of Diminishing Returns
- Helps balance people who are very detail oriented and meticulous
- Satisfice = Satisfy and Suffice
- Satisfiers = find an option that suffices for their purpose
- Maximizers = want to make perfect decision, puts in a lot of effort, despite the law of diminishing returns
- E.g. in an interview process, once you have interviewed 37% of candidates, you can go back and make a selection as statistically you have seen all possible option and need not interview the rest of 63%
Mental Model 5: Stay within 40–70%
- Powell has a mental model about making decisions and coming to a point of action no sooner than necessary yet no longer than necessary.
- He says that anytime you face a difficult decision, you should have no less than 40% and no more than 70% of the information you need to make that decision.
Mental Model 6: Minimize Regret
- Consult future You on a current decision
- Make a decision that as a 80yr old and looking back, you feel minimum regrets
- By Jeff Bezos of Amazon
2: How to see more clearly
Mental Model 7: Ignore the Black Swans
- 3 characteristics of a black swan event: 1) Big Surprise, 2) Major effect, 3) Rationalize after it happens
- Don’t take Black Swan event as normal, treat it as outlier, otherwise we try to find pattern in a random event
- Jump on conclusion based on imperfect, skewed or incomplete information
Mental Model 8: Equilibrium Points or Law of Diminishing Returns
- Use to find real patterns in a data and not be fooled
- Recognizing Law of Diminishing Returns
- Balance between to more accurately analyze information and to know where your own equilibrium points are and when you should rethink how much effort you are putting in for the number of results you are getting
Mental Model 9: Regression to Mean
- Things might spike, but eventually they return to their natural mean
- Eg. a batsman can score 200 in an inning, but over long term, his average inning is going to regress to his mean batting score
Mental Model 10: What would Bayes Do? Or Play by Probability
- Use probability to predict the future
Mental Model 11: Do it like Darwin or Beware of Confirmation Bias
- Use to seek real, honest truth in a situation
- Darwin was relentless learner, diligent note-taker and information organizer, attention and focus, work ethic. Thought process was purposely slow and believed in long-term learning and expertise.
- Darwin paid special attention to evidence or explanation that went against his findings, as he was aware that human mind is inclined to dispose contrary views or Confirmation Bias
- Lot of self-reflection or self-questioning
Mental Model 12: Think with System 2
- System 1: Speed and Conservation of Energy, intutive
- System 2: Accuracy and Analysis, slow thinking
- Be aware of which System you are using in a situation, for analytical decision deliberately use System 1
3. Eye Opening Problem Solving
Mental Model 13: Peer Review Your Perspectives
- Helps uncover biases
- Helps arrive at a more consensus position based on feedback and course correction
Mental Model 14: Find Your Own Flaws
- Use to scrutinize yourself before others can
- Treat your perspective or opinion as a hypothesis that must be tested and verified. Key to this is not being emotionally invested in the outcome, or defensive about being correct as opposed to seeking the honest truth
Mental Model 15: Separate Correlation from Causation
- Can use Five Whys? to understand to root cause
Mental Model 16: Storytell in Reverse
- Use to determine causation more effectively
- Fishbone Diagram visualize micro and macro factors that play a role in leading to effect or the problem
- Systematically working backward from the problem to the causes
Mental Model 17: SCAMPER It
- Use to methodically and creatively solve problem with force fitting
- 7-methods that help direct thinking toward novel ideas or solutions:
— S=Substitute
— C=Combine
— A=Adapt
— M=Minimize/Magnify
— P=Put to other use
— E=Eliminate
— R=Reverse
Mental Model 18: Get Back to First Principles
- Break preconceptions and find your own solutions
- Stripping everything about the problem away until you have the basic components
4. Anti-Mental Models
Mental Model 19: Avoid Direct Goals or Invert Thinking
- Rather than thinking of direct goals like success or happiness
- Think and define failure or causes of unhappiness
- Create methods to avoid them
Mental Model 20: Avoid thinking like an Expert
- Be able to see both the forest (big picture) and the trees (finer details)
- Goldovsky error: Error spotted by people who lack experience in the field rather than the experts
- Goldovsky discovered a misprint in the sheet of music that was widely printed, he himself didn’t discover it until his pupil pointed it out
- Experts ability to skim through the details and make assumption of the parts they skim
- Separate your thinking into expert and novice
Mental Model 21: Avoid Your Non-Genius Zones
- Don’t operate outside your zone of genius, play by your strengths
We would rather deal with what we understand, why would we want to play a competitive game in a field where we have no advantages
Charlie Munger
Mental Model 22: Avoid To-Do Lists
- Use to direct your attention only to what matters at the moment
- Takes you away from what to do now
Mental Model 23: Avoid Path of Least Resistance
- Use to exercise more self-discipline and willpower
- Avoid the easy path
4. Oldies but Goldies
Mental Model 24: Murphy’s Law
- Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong
- Don’t leave matters to chance
- Murphy’s First Corollary: Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Any attempt on your part to correct this will only accelerate the process.
- Murphy’s Second Corollary: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
- Murphy’s Constant: Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.
- Quantized Revision of Murphy’s Law: Everything goes wrong all at once.
- Etorre’s Observation: The other line always moves faster.
Mental Model 25: Occam’s Razor
- The simplest explanation is usually the correct one
Mental Model 26: Hanlon’s Razor
- Explain actions by giving others benefit of doubt
- Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by neglect/incompetence
Mental Model 27: Pareto’s Principle
- 20% of effort produces 80% of results
Mental Model 28: Sturgeon’s Law
- 90% of everything is crap
Mental Model 29: Parkinson’s Law of Attention to Trivialities
Disproportionate amount of time and attention given to trivialities
— People are prone to overthinking and fixating on small details that don’t matter in grand scheme of things
— It feels good to be productive, thus triviality without any real progress sets in
— Sub-consciously avoiding real work
Mental Model 30: Parkinson’s Law of Work Expands to Time Given
- Work expands to fill the time given
- Wanting to work at a relaxed pace often just causes self-sabotage.
- To avoid this, have strict agenda and goals for the meeting, and have awareness when you start to lose focus on important and critical things
