Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

These recurring concepts are called mental models.

because they not only help us better understand what is going on around us, but also make us more effective decision makers in all areas of our lives.

critical mass, the mass of nuclear material needed to create a critical state whereby a nuclear chain reaction is possible.

Every discipline, like physics, has its own set of mental models

There is a smaller set of mental models, however, that are useful in general day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking. These often originate in specific disciplines (physics, economics, etc.), but have metaphorical value well beyond their originating discipline.

We call these broadly useful mental models super models because applying them regularly gives you a super power: super thinking—the ability to think better about the world—which you can use to your advantage to make better decisions, both personally and professionally.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

If you can identify a mental model that applies to the situation in front of you, then you immediately know a lot about it.

When I urge a multidisciplinary approach . . . I’m really asking you to ignore jurisdictional boundaries. If you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump these boundaries. You don’t have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it’s not that hard to do.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

Being Wrong Less

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thinking about a problem from an inverse perspective can unlock new solutions and strategies.

An inverse approach, by contrast, would be to try to avoid unhealthy options.

The concept of inverse thinking can help you with the challenge of making good decisions. The inverse of being right more is being wrong less.

In tennis, an unforced error occurs when a player makes a mistake not because the other player hit an awesome shot, but rather because of their own poor judgment or execution.

What you can do, however, is strive to make fewer unforced errors over time by using sound judgment and techniques to make the best decision at any given time.

antifragile,

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

make your thinking antifragile in the face of new decisions.

Unfortunately, evolution has hardwired us with several mind traps. If you are not aware of them, you will make poor decisions by default.

KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID!

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It’s the difference between being able to attack a math problem with a blank sheet of paper and needing a formula handed to you to begin with.

The central mental model to help you become a chef with your thinking is arguing from first principles. It’s the practical starting point to being wrong less, and it means thinking from the bottom up, using basic building blocks of what you think is true to build sound (and sometimes new) conclusions.

First principles are the group of self-evident assumptions that make up the foundation on which your conclusions rest—the ingredients in a recipe or the mathematical axioms that underpin a formula.

If you can argue from first principles, then you can more easily approach unfamiliar situations, or approach familiar situations in innovative ways.

First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. . . . You kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” . . . and then reason up from there. . . .

When arguing from first principles, you are deliberately starting from scratch. You are explicitly avoiding the potential trap of conventional wisdom, which could turn out to be wrong. Even if you end up in agreement with conventional wisdom, by taking the first-principles approach, you will gain a much deeper understanding of the subject at hand.

When using first principles, you’ll instead begin by thinking about what you truly value in a career (e.g., autonomy, status, mission, etc.), your required job parameters (financial, location, title, etc.), and your previous experience. When you add those up, you will get a much better picture of what might work best for your next career move, and then you can actively seek that out.

Ultimately, to be wrong less, you also need to be testing your assumptions in the real world, a process known as de-risking. There is risk that one or more of your assumptions are untrue, and so the conclusions you reach could also be false.

Once you get specific enough with your assumptions, then you can devise a plan to test (de-risk) them.

The most important assumptions to de-risk first are the ones that are necessary conditions for success and that you are most uncertain about.

Unfortunately, people often make the mistake of doing way too much work before testing assumptions in the real world. In computer science this trap is called premature optimization, where you tweak or perfect code or algorithms (optimize) too early (prematurely). If your assumptions turn out to be wrong, you’re going to have to throw out all that work, rendering it ultimately a waste of time.

The MVP is the product you are developing with just enough features, the minimum amount, to be feasibly, or viably, tested by real people.

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.”

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

While it is the best starting point you have right now, you must revise it often based on the real-world feedback you receive. And we recommend doing as little work as po...

minimum viable organization,

minimum viable communication,

minimum viable s...

minimum viable ex...

minimum viable expl...

The MVP forces you to evaluate your assumptions quickly.

Ockham’s razor helps here. It advises that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. When you encounter competing explanations that plausibly explain a set of data equally well, you probably want to choose the simplest one to investigate first.

This model is a razor because it “shaves off” unnecessary assumptions.

“Everything should be made as simple as it can be, but not simpler!”

“When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.”

A practical tactic is to look at your explanation of a situation, break it down into its constituent assumptions, and for each one, ask yourself: Does this assumption really need to be here? What evidence do...

Ockham’s razor is not a “law” in that it is always true; it just offers guidance.