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

by Gabriel Weinberg

“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” That is, you need to change color like the peppered moth did.

On a shorter time scale, any personal or professional project can be viewed from the perspective of a flywheel. It is slow when you get started on the project, but once you gain some momentum, it seems easier to make progress. And as we discussed in Chapter 3, when we multitask, we never get enough momentum on any one task for it to start to feel easier. Instead, we are constantly spending energy starting and restarting the wheel rather than taking advantage of its momentum once we get it to start spinning.