Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

Knowing about new technologies can help you improve your day-to-day life, through such current innovations as virtual assistants, new delivery services, or telemedicine.

Just discovering a secret is not enough; your timing must also be right. Pushing on an idea too soon can result in a lot of wasted time and money, possibly leading you to miss out on the opportunity altogether. Unfortunately, new ideas and ways of doing things can face a lot of challenges that make this timing difficult to get right.

This inertia can be a barrier against both the spreading of the idea and the ability to raise capital to fund it. New ideas also often face technological barriers to mass adoption.

To address this timing question more systematically, ask yourself why now?

Why now? Would it make a difference if you waited longer? What would you be waiting for in particular? Given the array of things you can work on, is there another change you should be making right now?

You can also consider this question using inverse thinking (see Chapter 1). Instead of asking why now?, ask now what?

When you see something change in the world around you, ask yourself what new opportunities might open up as a result. From the political sphere to the personal and organizational, many sweeping cha...

The why now model also explains why there are often concurrent academic discoveries across the world and similar startups independently emerging simultaneously.

simultaneous invention, or multiple discovery.

The underlying conditions were ripe for these ideas, and often more than one person will act on the same secret once they have determined the time is right to pursue the opportunity.

VISION WITHOUT EXECUTION IS JUST HALLUCINATION

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People with great, timely insights often fail to achieve great returns due to poor execution.

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”

Successful, world-changing ideas almost always involve changing the behavior of a large group of people: how they live, work, entertain themselves, or even how they think.

Whether your idea is business-focused or not, you can think of the people whose behavior it seeks t...

Even if you are the first to market with the idea, you will still lose out to the competition if your product cannot create the necessary behavioral change.

organization to try to capitalize on a secret can indeed have a first-mover advantage, crafting a competitive advantage derived from being the first to move into a market with a product. However, they can also experience a first-mover disadvantage if they make a lot of mistakes. Fast-followers can copy the first mover, learn from their mistakes, and then quickly surpass them, leaving the first mover ultimately disadvantaged even though they were first.

For a first mover, the difference between success and failure hinges on whether they can also be first ...

“First to market seldom matters. Rather, first to product/market fit is almost always the long-term winner. . . .

Once a company has achieved product/market fit, it is extremely difficult to dislodge it, even with a better or less expensive product.”

A company without product/market fit finds it extremely hard to obtain customers; in contrast, a company with product/market fit finds i...

A model that captures these phenomena is resonant frequency. This model comes from physics and explains why glass can break if you play just the right note:

Each object has a different frequency at which it naturally oscillates. When you play that frequency, such as the right tone for a wineglass, the energy of the wave causes the glass to vibrate more and more until it breaks.

True resonance is like that: not one or two times better, but many, many times better.

Resonance

One way to increase your chances of getting to product/market fit is through customer development, a product development model established by entrepreneur Steve Blank that focuses you on taking a customer-centric view.

You set up a quick feedback loop with them to learn as much as you can about their needs, resulting in a repeatable process to acquire and retain them.

“There are no facts inside the building so get the hell outside!”

If you can ask the right questions, you can find out whether you have something people really want, signaling product/market fit.

That’s why you build an MVP

run experiments with customers to see how it is actually used (if at all), continually refining your product as you incorporate real-world feedback via this rapid experimentation process.

Talk to residents before you move somewhere. Interview current employees before you take a job. Poll a community before enacting a new policy. For any idea you have, think about who the “customer” is and then go talk to them directly abo...

To give yourself the best chance of winning this race, you must engage in customer development the fastest. A model from the military can help: the OODA loop, which is a decision loop of four steps—observe, orient, decide, act (OODA).

OODA Loop

The OODA loop applies best in situations where rapid learning will give you an advantage; not every situation is so uncertain and ever changing, though many are.

As a result, creating fast OODA loops is becoming more important over time. The organization with the fastest OODA loop learns faster than its competitors, consistently makes better decisions, and adapts faster to the unfolding technology landscape.

OODA loops may call natural selection to mind (see Chapter 4).

Species that have faster life cycles evolve faster, so you might say they h...

having a faster OODA loop helps you adapt faster to changing circumstances,

If, after extensive customer development, you still cannot find this promised land of product/market fit, then you must pivot to something different. A pivot is a change in course of strategic direction,

Pivoting is usually difficult because it cuts against organizational inertia, involves openly admitting failure, and requires finding a better direction, all at the same time. But it can also be necessary.

Pivoting is appropriate when your current strategy is not going to bring you the results you are seeking.

More broadly, pivoting can apply across all areas of life: your career path, a difficult relationship, how you’re approaching meeting your child’s educational needs, and so forth.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen named and championed the model of jobs to be done, which asks you to figure out the real job that your product does, which can be different than what you might initially think.

“Customers want to ‘hire’ a product to do a job,

‘People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a q...

Knowing the real job your product does helps you align both product development and m...

Instead, Steve Jobs famously framed the iPod as “1,000 songs in your pocket,” recognizing that the real job the product was solving was letting you carry your music collection with you.

When you truly understand what job people are really trying to get done by using your product, then you can focus your efforts on meeting that need.

In your analysis, you want to figure out what job your product is really currently doing and where it might be miscast, as in the milkshake example