Sep 29, 2020
Week 28, 2020
Seeking Wisdom: Mental Models, Stupidity Avoidance, and Backward Thinking
Each week I share three ideas for how to make work better. And this week, those ideas come courtesy of Peter Bevelin’s Seeking Wisdom — From Darwin to Munger.
Why am I writing about this? Seeking Wisdom is a wonderful book, packed full of tools for better thinking inspired by luminaries of past and present — from Confucius to Darwin to Charlie Munger. I’ve been meaning to write about it for ages. But as a reference book, it more or less defies conventional treatment. And so today, I’ll simply relay to you three of the many tools that the book provides, with the hope that it inspires you to explore the book on your own.
Let’s dig in.
1. Mental Models
“I think the best question is, ‘is there anything I can do to make my whole life and my whole mental process work better?’ And I would say that developing the habit of mastering multiple models which underlie reality is the best thing you can do.” — Charlie Munger
Mental models are representations of how the world works. Ideas, principles, proverbs; the format doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that mental models help us to quickly make sense of things. Thermodynamics, for example, is a mental model that says that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form. It’s a complex problem transformed into an essential truth. And the more of these ‘essential truths’ we’re armed with — the larger our toolbox — the less likely we are to make incorrect inferences and faulty decisions.
Mental models galore at Farnam Street.
2. Stupidity Avoidance
“Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime, it’s just too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions…Therefore, we have adopted a strategy that required our being smart — and not too smart at that — only a few times.” — Warren Buffett
Other examples of mental models include Occam’s Razor and First Principle Thinking — both of which help us simplify the problems we’re faced with. For example, Elon Musk is famous for his First Principle approach which — like science more generally — involves breaking things down into component parts and working from there. But whatever the tool, simplification is about minimizing the number of decisions we have to make. Success, says Munger, is less about making good decisions and more about avoiding the bad ones. There are huge dangers in getting so caught up in small decisions that you miss organized common sense.
More? Again, Farnam Street is your friend.
3. Backwards Thinking
“‘You must always invert,’ said the 19th Century German mathematician Karl Jacobi when asked the secret of his mathematical discoveries. Whenever we try to achieve a goal, solve a problem, predict what is likely to happen…we should think things through backwards.” — Peter Bevelin
If you want to stump someone, ask them how you might make your next project a guaranteed success. You might get lucky, but chances are you’ll get a lot of “umming and ahing” instead. There are few guarantees to be had. Unless, that is, you flip the question around and ask how you might make your next project a guaranteed failure! Do that and the flood gates of bad advice will open far and wide. And that’s a good thing! Because all you need to do in order to turn bad into good is to do the exact opposite. And while it might not give you a receipt for guaranteed success, it will most definitely expose whatever blind spots you might have!
To think backward, try running a premortem.
In his 1986 Harvard commencement speech, Charlie Munger laid out seven Prescriptions for Guaranteed Misery in Life. Second on his list: “[L]earn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and the bad experience of others, living and dead.”
:-)
That’s backward thinking for you, with a bit of irony thrown in for good measure.
My point is this: unless you have time to read Confucius and Darwin and Munger and everyone in between, you’ll find that books like Seeking Wisdom are very handy indeed. Peter Bevelin spent a good while collecting sage advice from some very smart people. And that advice is available in a book store near you.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time, stay calm.
