Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

With Peterson’s help, Heifer improved the catalog each year, running dozens of experiments through changes to its look, contents, production, distribution, and publicity. This constant testing and experimentation helped the company’s revenue grow a little bit each year, never slowing down. It has continued to sustain higher and higher levels through today.

There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.

On the other hand, trying to change something that has a lot of inertia is challenging because of the outsized effort required.

there is homeostasis, which describes a situation in which an organism constantly regulates itself around a specific target, such as body temperature.

For example, in the U.S., attempts at campaign finance reform have continually failed as lobbying groups have found new and innovative ways to react to regulations, and they continue to infuse their money into politics.

Unfortunately, as a result of these types of homeostatic reactions, we stay in suboptimal arrangements for too long, from toxic personal relationships to poor organizational processes, all the way up to ineffective government policies.

Anticipating this reaction, some people eat protein after working out to mitigate the homeostatic effect, because certain types of slow-digesting proteins help you feel full for longer. What is the “eating protein” equivalent in whatever situation you’re dealing with?

One common approach is to get data that support the desired change, and then use that data to counteract objections to it.

change: potential energy and center of gravity.

Potential energy is the stored energy of an object, which has the potential to be released.

Center of gravit...

center point in an object or system around which its ...

Any time a roly-poly is tilted, its potential energy increases, as it takes in the energy used to tilt the toy. When released, this energy gets translated into a wobble around its center of gravity. Potential energy like this comes in many physical forms: gravitational, such as any object lifted up; elastic, such as a taut bowstring or spring; chemical, such as the energy locked up in food or fuel; etc.

Metaphorically, we talk about people and organizations having pent-up energy, energy waiting to be unlocked,

Hidden potential energy is another thing you can look for w...

They may be willing to help you. Talking to a diverse set of potential stakeholders can help you discover these hi...

Knowing an opponent’s center of gravity tells you where to attack to inflict the most damage or what pieces of their infrastructure they will defend more than others.

As applied tactically to enact change, if you can identify the center of gravity of an idea, market, or process—anything—then you might effect change faster by acting on that specific point.

Businesses often take advantage of this concept by seeking endorsements from celebrities, influencers, press, or marquee clients.

In this context, it’s a type of pressure point: press it, and you can move the whole system.

Activation energy is the minimum amount of energy needed to activate a chemical reaction between two or more reactants.

A catalyst decreases the activation energy needed to start a chemical reaction.

More generally, activation energy can refer to the amount of effort it would take to start to change something, and catalyst to anything that would decrease this effort.

In Chapter 3 we described how commitment can help you overcome present bias;

forcing function, to reach the activation energy required for a personal or organizational change.

For instance, you can set the expectation of producing weekly project updates, which serve as catalysts to think critically about project status and communicate progress to stakeholders.

The title of this section is Don’t Fight Nature. You should be wary of fighting high-inertia systems blindly. Instead, you want to look at things more deeply, understand their underlying dynamics, and try to craft a high-leverage path to change that is more likely to succeed in a timely manner.

what often creates the underlying momentum behind new ideas as they permeate society: critical mass.

critical mass is the mass of nuclear material needed to create a nuclear chain reaction, where the by-products of one reaction are used as the inputs for the next, chaining them together in a self-perpetuating fashion.

Believe it or not, Frisch figured out the critical mass in part by physically stacking three-centimeter uranium bars, continually measuring their radioactive output as the stack grew larger.

applies to any system in which an accumulation can reach a threshold amount that causes a major change in the system.

changing dramatically, rapidly gaining momentum, is often referred to as a tipping point.

Sometimes this point is also referred to as an inflection point, where the growth curve bends, or inflects.

points. Did a tipping point just happen? Will one ever happen? What could be a catalyst?

The spreading, or diffusion, of an idea or technology is known as the technology adoption life cycle.

Reaching a critical mass is a common proximate cause (see Chapter 1) of a tipping point. But the root cause of why a tipping point has been reached is often found in network effects, where the value of a network grows with each addition to it (the effect).

It describes the nonlinear growth in network value when nodes are connected to one another.

Having a million telephones on the phone network is much more than twice as valuable as having five hundred thousand.

Critical mass occurs when there are enough nodes present to make a network useful.

Amazingly, the fax machine was invented in the 1840s, but people didn’t regularly use it until the 1970s, when there were enough fax machines to reach critical mass.

The lesson here is, when you know that the concept of critical mass applies to your endeavor, you want to pay special attention to it.

What is the critical mass point for this idea or technology? What needs to happen for it to reach critical mass? Are there network effects or other catalysts that can make reaching critical mass happen sooner? Can I reorganize the system so that critical mass can be reached in a sub-community sooner?

Harmful ideas and technologies can also reach critical mass and spread quickly through societies.

known more generally as a cascading failure, where a failure in one piece of a system can trigger a chain reaction of failure that cascades through the entire system.

The 2007/2008 financial crisis is another example of a cascading failure, where a failure in subprime mortgages ultimately led to failures in major financial institutions.

It’s not all bad, though; these are natural laws that can be used for good or bad. The nuclear critical mass can be used for relatively safe, essentially unlimited nuclear energy, or the nuclear critical mass could be the delivery mechanism of a catastrophic nuclear winter.

And if you are trying to gain mainstream adoption and long-term inertia for a new idea or technology, you will want to understand how these models directly relate to your strategy.

That means that while you can guess which way they are trending, it’s impossible to precisely predict their overall long-term state.

He introduced a metaphor known as the butterfly effect to explain the concept that chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to small perturbations or changes in initial conditions.

The fact that you are surrounded by chaotic systems is a key reason why adaptability is so important to your success. While it is a good idea to plan ahead, you cannot accurately predict the circumstances you will face.