The Math of Clean Bathrooms
What do clean restaurant bathrooms have to do with math? Everything!
You can be forgiven for not knowing that. It has to do with the fact that anytime you multiply anything by zero it becomes a zero and a dirty bathroom has the same effect on your restaurant experience. You kinda wonder what the kitchen’s like if they can’t clean urine off the toilet seat.
This is Multiplying by zero, a mathematical concept that has broad application all over our lives. Because it’s always true, it’s often useful. This is what we call a mental model.
‘Mental Models’ is the new ‘it’ girl of the intellectual world. Trying to be the equivalent of the meat-dress wearing Lady Gaga giving us a new understanding of pop-star, they are being sold everywhere as a new way to own the world. I mean, models that explain everything? About anything? Where have they been all your life?
They haven’t been far. And chances are you’ve been using them every day.
Buried in physics, psychology, philosophy, and other disciplines that start with a ‘p’, mental models are really just laws of the universe that are multidimensional. Meaning that they can explain why water freezes and why steam helped normalize female orgasms (Steam power came before safe electricity right around when doctors decided that orgasms could cure a lot of feminine ills. The problems were that women generally weren’t seen as sexual creatures, and don’t orgasm as reliably from intercourse. Learning more about the female body combined with new steam technology that allowed for vibrators developed our modern understanding that female orgasms are just as normal as men’s. That’s criticality and it’s also really useful for deciding how to build morale in a workforce.)
The problem is, mental models can be a bit intimidating. It seems that everyone says you can’t just have one, because then you’ll overuse it and apply it to situations causing explosions. This is true, but it’s also a bit of a scare tactic. A way to make you buy-in to a mental models regime. But one is better than none, and it’s more important to be interested in the concept first.
Picking a list at random is also scary. Because it seems that no one can agree on what they all are you get nervous. You don’t want to waste your time. You only have so much of it, and if you are going to get into this mental models thing, you want to make your effort count.
After a bit of searching, you find a post where some guy has helpfully listed the most useful ones at the top. 52? Gulp. I hope they’re easy! So you take a deep breath and think okay, I meditate now, I stopped consuming trans fat, and I drank lemon water for six weeks. I can handle this.
But then you look at the full list, and your finger cramps up with all the scrolling. How many are there? Seriously? And then you look up some of the models, ‘Second order thinking’ and ‘Inversion’ and all these unknown terms clutter the screen and you think ‘man, I didn’t even do calculus in high school, how the hell am I supposed to understand all this?’ and maybe you conclude that you can do without mental models.
But it doesn’t have to be this complicated. And in fact, it isn’t.
Mental models are timeless and useful because they are around us all the time. We just have to get better at using them as a lens to look at the world we live in.
Remember, you aren’t starting from nothing. There is a lot you already know. When you are pulling out of a parking spot, no matter how tight the turn is, you never worry about hitting another car as you accelerate out of the turn. This is geometry and you understand it because you use it every day.
A mental model approach would just have you asking, where else does this apply? Can this help me solve a problem at work? Should I just lean in?
Mental models help explain the world and how we can improve relationships. Remember that time you were fighting with your cousin because she spilled red wine all over your shirt and didn’t even offer to get in dry cleaned?
You lost a few years being irritated with each other, but then your grandfather got sick and when you saw her in the hospital you gave her a hug. Then she hugged you back and now you get together every two weeks and laugh at all your childhood memories. You thought it was because of your shared history or shared genetics. It wasn’t. It was actually Reciprocity and would work with most of the people you encounter everyday (narcissists don’t count.)
The point is, mental models aren’t hard. It takes work to learn them and shift your thinking, seeing how they apply across your life. But they are accessible. If they weren’t they’d be useless. But they are actually really amazing and can make your life much better.
Having a range of mental models to draw on to understand what is happening in your life leads to better decisions, more time, more money, less anxiety, and increased confidence. Why? Because we tend not to fear things we understand. Without this stress we make better observations and give our brains more time to work. This leads to better decisions. This means we don’t waste as much time and don’t have to spend money cleaning up our mess. This all culminates in more confidence. Who doesn’t want to look in the mirror each day knowing that they have kicked ass?
So don’t be freaked out by mental models. They’re for everybody. Come join us at Farnam Street and help make your life more awesome.
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