Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

The MVP keeps you from working by yourself for too long. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman put it like this: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

More recently, the composer Roger Sessions, paraphrasing Albert Einstein, put it like this: “Everything should be made as simple as it can be, but not simpler!”

A frame-of-reference mental trap (or useful trick, depending on your perspective) is framing.

My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.

In any conflict between two people, there are two sides of the story. Then there is the third story, the story that a third, impartial observer would recount. Forcing yourself to think as an impartial observer can help you in any conflict situation, including difficult business negotiations and personal disagreements.

MRI asks you to you interpret the other parties’ actions in the most respectful way possible. It’s giving people the benefit of the doubt.

You may also succumb to holding on to incorrect beliefs because of disconfirmation bias, where you impose a stronger burden of proof on the ideas you don’t want to believe.

The pernicious effects of confirmation bias and related models can be explained by cognitive dissonance, the stress felt by holding two contradictory, dissonant, beliefs at once.

Following your intuition alone at times like these can cause you to fall prey to anchoring, availability bias, framing, and other pitfalls.

When parties select transactions that they think will benefit them, based at least partially on their own private information, that’s called adverse selection.

When you try to incentivize behavior by setting a measurable target, people focus primarily on achieving that measure, often in ways you didn’t intend.

If you want greater luck surface area, you need to relax your rules for how you engage with the world. For example, you might put yourself in more unfamiliar situations: instead of spending the bulk of your time in your house or office, you might socialize more or take a class. As a result, you will make your own luck by meeting more people and finding more opportunities. Thinking of the butterfly effect, you are increasing your chances of influencing a tornado, such as forming a new partnership that ultimately blossoms into a large, positive outcome.

To keep the same level of trust with people, you need to keep building on it.

How true!

Just as in cost-benefit analysis and scoring pro-con lists, we recommend using utility values whenever possible because they paint a fuller picture of your underlying preferences, and therefore should result in more satisfactory decisions. In fact, more broadly, there is a philosophy called utilitarianism that expresses the view that the most ethical decision is the one that creates the most utility for all involved.

Joy’s law is a mental model named after Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, who remarked at an event in 1990, No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, known as Rumsfeld’s Rule: You go to war with the army you have. They’re not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Both Joy and Rumsfeld acknowledge that organizations hardly ever have perfect resources, nor can they always afford to wait until they have better ones before moving forward. Joy’s law further stresses that great people are unlikely to be concentrated in a single organization.

A February 4, 1996, quote from former U.S. senator Bill Bradley in The New York Times is apt: “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.”

A similar model from author Robert X. Cringley in his book Accidental Empires describes three types of people required in different phases of an organization’s life cycle—commandos, infantry, and police.

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson has made a career studying the fastest way to get good at something, a model he calls deliberate practice. It works by deliberately putting people in situations at the limit of their abilities, where they are constantly practicing increasingly difficult skills and receiving consistent real-time feedback.

Where there is low consequence and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate. And delegate completely, let people make mistakes and learn. On the other side, obviously where the consequences are dramatic and you have extremely high conviction that you are right, you actually can’t let your junior colleague make a mistake.

It’s sometimes said, “Culture is what happens when managers aren’t in the room.” It’s what people do when they’re left to their own devices. And that’s exactly why it is so high-leverage to develop and reinforce culture: You can’t look over people’s shoulders all the time.

For a first mover, the difference between success and failure hinges on whether they can also be first to achieve product/market fit. That’s when a product is a such a great fit for its market that customers are actively demanding more.