8 Useful Mental Models
Optimize the way you think
What are mental models?
Mental models are frameworks that we can use to make sense of the world around us. In a reality as complex as ours, we need mental models to simplify concepts, make connections between ideas and identify important information from the surrounding sea of noise.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s less public (but no less successful) partner at Berkshire Hathaway, attributes much of his success to accumulating and applying hundreds of mental models.
For most of his life, Munger has been thinking about ways to think better. Rather than memorising isolated facts, he argues that you need to string facts together in a model or theory to organize them into a usable form. Importantly, your mental models need to come from a variety of disciplines and schools of thoughts so you can tackle problems in a three dimensional manner and avoid missing crucial information. No one model is perfect, but combining them gives you powerful toolkit to analyse information and make sound decisions.
Developing the habit of mastering the multiple models which underlie reality is the…
