Super Thinking: Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

paradox of choice,

Schwartz explains that an overabundance of choice, the fear of making a suboptimal decision, and the potential for lingering regret following missed opportunities can leave people unhappy.

There is also a model that explains the downside of making many decisions in a limited period: decision fatigue. As you make more and more decisions, you get fatigued, leading to a worsening of decision quality.

period: decision fatigue. As you make more and more decisions, you get fatigued, leading to a worsening of decision quality.

term to too much of a good thing. Most generally, consider heeding Murphy’s law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

intended as a defensive suggestion, to remind you to be prepared and to have a plan for when things go wrong.

called north star, which refers to the guiding vision of a company.

If you can orient yourself toward your north star and prioritize the right activities, you can accomplish amazing things over time. There are infinite possibilities,

“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in the next ten.

Your incremental progress toward a goal may not be noticeable day to day. But over a long period of time, many small steps can get you really far if you stay pointed in the right direction.

you are pointed toward your north star, you have the opportunity to take advantage of the same concept by compounding your ability to move in your chosen direction. That’s because what you can accomplish draws on your cumulative knowledge, skills, and network.

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” If you’ve ever had to supervise two or more children

we explained that there are two types of thinking: low-concentration, autopilot thinking (for saying your name, walking, simple addition, etc.) and high-concentration, deliberate thinking (for everything else). You can fully perform only one

You can fully perform only one high-concentration activity at a time. Your brain just isn’t capable of simultaneously focusing on two high-concentration activities at once. If you attempt this, you will be forced to context-switch between the two activities.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

insight on this difficulty. Sayre’s law, named after political scientist Wallace Sayre, offers that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.

A related concept is Parkinson’s law of triviality, named after naval historian Cyril Parkinson, which states that organizations tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues

disproportionate time to unimportant details while crucial details go unattended.

“the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

as bike-shedding.

the amount of discussion is inversely proportional to the complexity of the decision.

You can further set strict time limits for each agenda item (called timeboxing) to ensure that any bike-shedding that does arise doesn’t take over the entire meeting. For a real-life example, consider the recurring

“You can do anything, but not everything.” You must pick between the important activities in front of you, or else you will find yourself multitasking and lacking time for deep work.

you: opportunity cost. Every choice you make has a cost: the value of the best alternative opportunity you didn’t choose. As a rule, you want to choose the option with the lowest opportunity cost.

In business, opportunity cost is sometimes formalized as the opportunity cost of capital, the return you’d get on the best alternative use of that capital, your second-best opportunity

leveraged buyout takes place when one company buys out another, partially using other people’s money.

The Pareto principle can help you find high-leverage activities. It states that in many situations, 80 percent of the results come from approximately 20 percent of the effort. Addressing this 20 percent is therefore a high-leverage activity.

This particular 80/20 arrangement of outcomes is known as a power law distribution, where relatively few occurrences account for a significantly outsized proportion of the total.

each additional hour of work will unfortunately produce less and less impactful results. In economics, this model is called the law of diminishing returns. It is the tendency for continued effort to diminish in effectiveness after a certain level of result has been achieved.

In economics, this model is called the law of diminishing returns. It is the tendency for continued effort to diminish in effectiveness after a certain level of result has been achieved.

for eg when you set up a business you hire labour and they bring some productivity in work & as work expands, you hire more workers and expect productivity to increase in proportion to it. This will happen up to a threshold, beyond which hiring more workers will be less productive .and that is the law of diminishing return

law of diminishing utility, which says that the value, or utility, of consuming an additional item is usually, after a certain point, less than the value of the previous one consumed.

One reason why people procrastinate so much is present bias, which is the tendency to overvalue near-term rewards in the present over making incremental progress on long-term goals (see short-termism in Chapter

why people procrastinate so much is present bias, which is the tendency to overvalue near-term rewards in the present over making incremental progress on long-term goals

It’s really easy to find reasons on any given day to skip going to the gym (too much work, bad sleep, feeling sick/sore, etc.), but if you do this too often, you...

Everyone discounts the future as compared with the prese...

When you add the discounted earnings together from all future years, you get the net present value, or NPV,

the path of least resistance, 401(k) programs also showcase the default effect, the effect stemming from the fact that many people just accept default options.

Parkinson’s law (yes, another law by the same Parkinson of Parkinson’s law of triviality) states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

When your top priority has a deadline far in the future, it doesn’t mean that you need to spend all your time on it until the deadline. The sooner you finish, the sooner you can move on to the next item on your list.

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law

loss aversion is the model that explains why. You are more inclined to avoid losses, to be averse to them, than you are to want to make similar gains.

When it comes to losses in particular, you need to acknowledge that they’ve already happened: you’ve already spent the resources on the project to date. When you allow these irrecoverable costs to cloud your decision making, you are falling victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. The costs of the project so far, including your time spent, have already been sunk. You can’t get them back.

the sunk-cost fallacy. The costs of the project so far, including your time spent, have already been sunk. You can’t get them back.

You need to avoid thinking, We’ve come too far to stop now.

When starting something new, a good thing to remind yourself is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

You should consider heuristics because they can be a shortcut to a solution for the problem in front of you, even if they may not work as well in other situations.

black boxes, which means they require very little understanding by the user of how they work.

black box algorithms include recommendation systems on Netflix or Amazon, matching on online dating sites, and content moderation on social media.

“The craftsmanship is the workbench itself,” suggest that the more sophisticated tools get, the fewer skills are required to operate them.