10x Core Concepts — Model thinking for everyone and everywhere
Introduction
How can we give anyone and anywhere powerful tools and ideas that can help them to effectively change the world for better and find meaning in their careers and lives?
10x Core Concepts aim to provide basic building blocks for model thinking and the Education 3.0 — by anyone and anywhere.
Various thinkers and authors listed so called mental models coming from various scientific disciplines that can help us to succeed in practical life. Charlie Munger, partner of Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway, has mentioned over hundred such models in his interviews and lectures to university students.
Scott E. Page from the Michigan University created a course at Coursera called Model Thinking and excellently explains over hundred models.
The aim of 10x Core Concepts is to simplify 10x so we start not with one hundred but only 10 core “model thinking” concepts that can help us to quickly learn and connect to other concepts. So these 10 core concepts would make it much easier and faster to acquire 100 or more other mental models and big ideas from various disciplines.
These would allow people or machines to take a deep dive into various disciplines. But the good knowledge of this 10x Core Concepts would keep them from falling into too much detail at the beginning and losing the bigger picture and the overall bird-eye perspective.
So 10x Core Concepts creates a powerful toolbox of 10 core mental models that a young person from anywhere, be it a rural high school in Africa or Slovakia, can learn in 2 hours and practice in 20 hours to use with ease.
Summary of 10x Core Concepts
1. Growth versus Development
When children are young their physical growth is really important. But when they reach adolescence their growth stops and personal development is crucial. This seems to be a general principle of how quantity and quality relate. If we didn’t stop to grow, our bones would become fragile and we would die. Big animals like elephants have fragile legs. The same applies to institutions, corporations and empires. They can become too big to fail. And thus they can make the whole systems and ecosystems too fragile.
Currently companies solve problems related to the “quantity of life” issues from the first half of the Maslow Pyramid of Needs (Physical, Security, Social). We need companies that solve for “quality of life” issues and needs on the second half of the pyramid (Esteem, Self-Actualization).
See the whole article here.
2. Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset
A growth mindset is probably the most important ingredient in the ability to learn how to learn and thus propel personal development.
Our biggest obstacle is the lack of imagination. Growth mindset is the power of “not yet” against the “tyranny of now”. Developed by the psychologist Carol Dweck, growth mindset creates a victorious circle of curiosity, hard work and growing confidence in personal abilities. The opposite to it is a fixed mindset when children and adults don’t even try to solve challenges that lie in from of them.
Maybe they believe they will never understand math. So they cheat instead of working hard. This creates a vicious circle of envy, corruption and failure. A person with a growth mindset understands that they are not there yet, but if they try and invest for example 2 hours to understand the problem and 20 hours to solve the problem they can do it.
People who want to encourage a growth mindset should praise the process and not the results. They should not praise children that they are super talented in something, rather they should praise their effort, or tell them they need to work harder next time.
See the whole article here.
3. Fragility — Robustness — Antifragility
A growth mindset empowers us to be less fragile by taking on challenges and learning new things. If we have growth mindset we understand “the power of not yet” and know that the pain and frustration, we experience when we learn new things will gradually wear off, and we will become much faster and stronger in these new skills we painfully develop. But we need to understand the distinction between fragility, robustness and antifragility.
Probably you saw packages with label “Fragile! Handle with care!”. Imagine if you saw a package with a label “Antifragile, please mishandle.” Antifragility is a concept developed by Nassim Taleb and can be best illustrated with physical exercise such as weight lifting. If you apply reasonable stress to your muscles by exercising they become gradually stronger and bigger. If you don’t exercise or don’t move your muscles they become weaker and more fragile. So the stressors help us become stronger.
Antifragility is different from a mere robustness and is the real opposite of fragility. Robustness is merely in the middle of a scale from fragility to antifragility. Antifragility can prosper during volatile periods, robustness can merely withstand misfortune or volatility.
Imagine a writer who gets bad reviews, but people discuss his work and thus becomes more famous. He is under the stress of criticism and needs to endure it. But this negativity if it is not too strong and fatal actually helps to spread the word about his book and makes him famous.
4. Garden versus Machine
A garden is very different from a machine. If you pour 6 or 60 liters of fuel into a machine it doesn’t matter. But if you pour 6 or 60 liters of water in your garden it might have very different effects. Too little water and your plants might die. Too much water and your plants might die as well. The balance, good measure and right timing are all crucial. This is how complex systems behave.
If you have only one type of plants in your garden you might be more fragile than if you have 10 types of plants in your garden. A disease might attack one type but leave others intact.
The same applies to the number of transferable skills, personal traits and the number of your connections or customers. A good measure is important. You grow too quickly and you might fail because you underestimate the importance of the development and quality management. You grow too slow and you might fall behind competition.
Many things in life and in the society are more like a garden, and less like a machine. If you are too extreme or too specialized in one area, you might not see the bigger picture or might miss a chance to positively influence the world. It is like pouring too much water on your plants at once. If you bother people with your ideas or products too much they might switch off and disregard what you are saying. Moderation is key.
5. Exponential growth versus linear growth
Some things grow like 1…2…3…4…5, others grow like 1…2…8…16…32, and others like 1…10…100…1,000…10,000. Something that seems to be unthinkable or extremely expensive suddenly can overtake the world. This is the idea behind Moore’s Law, an observation that the speed of computers used to double in less than two years. And the result is that most of us now carry super computers in our pockets hidden in every mobile phone. Before you would need a football-field-like computer and you would still not achieve such processing power.
To make a huge positive difference in the world think which innovation could reduce a certain important global problem 10x in two years, or impact at least one billion people in 10 years.
6. Probability and Bayesian Updating
Flip a coin and see if you get heads or tails. Do this thousand times, always write a result, and there is a high chance you end up with something similar to 500 heads and 500 tails. This means that when you flip a coin, the chances that you end up with a head or a tail is 1 to 1. Together we have two options, heads or tails, so each has a 50% chance of happening. This can be also written as one half, or ½ probability.
Now imagine someone played a trick on you, and put a bit of a chewing gum on one side of the coin. Suddenly the probabilities of heads and tails might change. You need to update your knowledge about that particular coin, by once again flipping it and recording the results you get. Now this one particular and real coin is different from the coin in your head that should give always an equal chance to heads and tails. Now suddenly you realize “a map is not a territory”. What you knew before about coins no longer applies to this one particular coin. The world changed slightly, at least regarding this one coin, and you need to update your thinking about this one coin by doing experiments with it.
This generalizes to everything and is the foundation of the scientific method.
7. Computational Thinking
If you want to cook a new dish you need to search for a recipe or come up with your own. It has exact steps and instructions — if you have this vegetable put it to a pan at this time, else use another vegetable and cook it shorter. This is a metaphor for coding. The difference is that computers can cook many dishes and use many pans at the same time. And they can repeat this tasks tirelessly. This is what we call computing and automation.
To harness the power of computers you need to learn how to break a problem or challenge you face into smaller problems and tasks that will solve them. And then learn how to feed this task to computer, because it can solve them often quicker and more efficiently than humans.
Today we hear often that automation and artificial intelligence threatens almost half of the current jobs. Some countries have even higher proportions of jobs that are in danger of automation.
Computational thinking can reduce this threat by empowering people to use the immense power of computation effectively.
8. Effective Altruism
Effective altruism is a combination of the scientific method and moral philosophy. This combination can help us to use our time, money, skills, connections and other resources to make the biggest possible positive impact.
The idea of effective altruism dates back to ancient China and the contemporary of Confucius, the philosopher Mozi, who thought that the state and society shall strive to increase wellbeing of all people, not just family members or our community.
The growth mindset can help us to challenge ourselves to think about what big problems we want to help to solve in our lives. The idea of exponential growth can give us an ambition to reduce a big problem 10x in 2 years or positively impact 1 billion people in 10 years. And the computational thinking can help us to break down the big problem into small parts and find our recipes and improve technologies that we need to solve the problem.
Effective altruism can help us to find out what big problems to focus on in the first place. And what strategies to use in solving them.
We need to first ask: What problems are the most important, solvable and neglected?
Come up with ideas and rate them from 1 to 10 on all three criteria. If you end up with a few highly rated global problems, choose according to what are you more personally passionate about.
Then to solve this selected problem you can apply four different strategies:
1. Earning to give — find a good job or start a successful business, and then donate or invest into organization that is most effective in your cause.
2. Advocate for effective solutions to that problem and promote them in public and your community.
3. Work in scientific research in that particular area.
4. Do a direct work for organizations and companies that are solving this problem effectively or start your own organization or a startup company in that area.
9. Effective team work: Givers — Matchers — Takers
Effective communication is the key for teams to succeed. You can create a rich society only if you expand the circle of people you trust. Sometimes you experience people hurting you for no reason. Before you start to have hard feelings toward them, ask if the conflict isn’t a result of a simple miscommunication. This might be the most probable reason. We are very different from each other and often assume others are like us and think like us.
When working in teams you will experience altruistic people who help others without expecting anything in return. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant calls them Givers.
You will also meet people who seem to take more than they give, they are often nice only to their bosses and use people as means to their goals. You can spot them by the way they treat and make feel people who are below them and who cannot provide them any favors. These people are often hostile to and competitive with their colleagues. You can call them Takers.
Then there is a third type of people who can spot the Takers and Givers, and are unfriendly to Takers and friendly to Givers. You can call them Matchers — they match the friendly or unfriendly behavior.
It is important to create a friendly and transparent culture in your team and communicate clearly and set the rules, roles and expectations. Also set the incentives and disincentives — you can call them “carrots and sticks”. If someone behaves with hostility, before applying the tit-for-tat strategy, ask if this was probably only a miscommunication and give them a second chance.
10. Digital Fabrication
Digital technologies are changing the world rapidly. One area is digital fabrication. It means that one can create a 2D or 3D model of a physical object like a jewelry and get it printed by a 3D printer. This type of printer creates “it from bit”. It uses additive manufacturing — prints a plastic or a metal, layer by layer, according to instructions from the computer. This reduces waste, costs and time that is needed to go from an idea in your head to a prototype and the even into a real final product.
Such technologies are currently growing exponentially and they will profoundly transform manufacturing as we know it. With the use of artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing.
There are mobile apps that let you take a picture of objects such as a vase, and create a 3D scan that will turn them into a 3D model and print them with the 3D printer. But if you learn the skills of computational thinking, coding and 3D modeling you can create almost anything and open your own personal factory at home, or in an office.
Next steps
This is the introduction to the first version of 10x Core Concepts. Please write us what to change and suggest your own core models. We will publish short articles with deeper explanation of each core concept through simple stories, and how it relates to other mental models.
Use these core concepts to create an Effective Innovation Canvas
These 10x Core Concepts can be applied immediately into Effective Innovation Canvas that we created at Sote Hub and that aims to build on top of tools like Lean Startup Canvas or Business Model Canvas. We wanted to simplify them and add the aspect of effective altruism, and creation of startups that solve for the biggest global problems.
