The Best Way To Improve Your Intelligence And Get Smarter

Published in

The Startup

5 min readJan 19, 2018

The best way to improve intelligence is to build mental representations in your mind. Charlie Munger, a billionaire, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and also known as partner of Warren Buffett, calls it the concept of mental model.

A mental model is an approach of mentally filing away a massive, but finite amount of fundamental, unchanging knowledge to form the tools that can be used in evaluating the infinite number of unique scenarios arising in the real world.

In a famous speech in the 1990s, Munger explained his approach to gaining practical wisdom:

“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. 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 two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. …

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

Munger’s system is like “cross-training for the mind.” Instead of compartmentalizing ourselves in the small, limited areas we may have studied in school, we study a broadly useful set of knowledge about the world, which will serve us in all parts of life.

In a nutshell, a mental model is a way to enhance your cognitive apparatus in order to make more intelligent and strategic decisions.

Justin Musk (Elon Musk’s ex-wife), also puts its beautifully in different words:

“Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life.”

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Anyone would state this appears a huge task.

Yes, It is. But aren’t the reward worth putting the efforts into? That’s why High Achievers are able to achieve more with less efforts.

See the rewards Warren Buffett gets by putting the mental models in practice, as Charlie Munger states. Warren is able to make quickest decisions, even if it is worth millions of dollars of investment. That’s what makes him earn 1.54 million dollars every hour (you can calculate hourly rate, based on what Wealth-X report of year 2013 stating that Warren Buffett made $12.7 billion in the year 2013).

How to apply this knowledge into practice?

We all agree that Knowledge is potential power. But knowledge when put to action is the real power One has to put this knowledge into practice. And the practice needs to be a deliberate practice as stated by Anders Ericcson in his book- “Peak- Secrets from the New Science of Expertise . Anders explains how deliberate practice is the key to open any doors of possibilities for you. In his words:

“The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties. The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.” He goes on to state: “There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.”