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June 22, 2019 - January 8, 2020
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.
Carl Jacobi was a nineteenth-century German mathematician who often used to say, “Invert, always invert”
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.
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.
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.
If you’re trying to be as objective as possible when making a decision or solving a problem, you always want to account for your frame of reference.
availability bias, which occurs when a bias, or distortion, creeps into your objective view of reality thanks to information recently made available to you.
Another tactical model that can help you empathize is the most respectful interpretation, or MRI. In any situation, you can explain a person’s behavior in many ways. 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.
Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.
The human tendency to gather and interpret new information in a biased way to confirm preexisting beliefs is called confirmation bias.
Sometimes you may want something to be true so badly that you fool yourself into thinking it is likely to be true. This feeling is known as optimistic probability bias,
More broadly, the tragedy of the commons arises from what is called the tyranny of small decisions, where a series of small, individually rational decisions ultimately leads to a system-wide negative consequence, or tyranny. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Over the next few days, look out for externalities. When you see or hear about someone or some organization taking an action, think about people not directly related to the action who might experience benefit or harm from it.
principal-agent problem, where the self-interest of the agent may lead to suboptimal results for the principal across a wide variety of circumstances.
Goodhart’s law summarizes the issue: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Both describe the same basic phenomenon: 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. Most importantly, their focus on the measure may not correlate to the behavior you hoped to promote.
This negative unintended consequence could be considered collateral damage. In a military context, this term means injuries, damage, inflicted on unintended, collateral, targets.
In other words, seemingly small changes in incentive structures can really matter. You should align the outcome you desire as closely as possible with the incentives you provide. You should expect people generally to act in their own perceived self-interest, and so you want to be sure this perceived self-interest directly supports your goals.
The general model for this impact comes from economics and is called path dependence, meaning that the set of decisions, or paths, available to you now is dependent on your past decisions.
One model that can help you figure out how to strike this balance in certain situations is the precautionary principle: when an action could possibly create harm of an unknown magnitude, you should proceed with extreme caution before enacting the policy. It’s like the medical principle of “First, do no harm.”
There is a natural conflict between the desire to make decisions quickly and the feeling that you need to accumulate more information to be sure you are making the right choice. You can deal with this conflict by categorizing decisions as either reversible decisions or irreversible decisions.
A north star is a long-term vision, so it is also okay if you don’t reach it anytime soon.
You can fully perform only one high-concentration activity at a time. Your brain just isn’t capable of simultaneously focusing on two high-concentration activities at once. If you attempt this, you will be forced to context-switch between the two activities.
You must pick between the important activities in front of you, or else you will find yourself multitasking and lacking time for deep work.
The Pareto principle can help you find high-leverage activities. It states that in many situations, 80 percent of the results come from approximately 20 percent of the effort. Addressing this 20 percent is therefore a high-leverage activity. This principle originated from observations
One reason why people procrastinate so much is present bias, which is the tendency to overvalue near-term rewards in the present over making incremental progress on long-term goals
Parkinson’s law (yes, another law by the same Parkinson of Parkinson’s law of triviality) states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Does that ring true for you? It certainly does for us.
In other words, things take longer than you expect, even when you consider that they take longer than you expect!
You are more inclined to avoid losses, to be averse to them, than you are to want to make similar gains.
you are falling victim to the sunk-cost fallacy.
The opposite of the well-tested design pattern is the anti-pattern, a seemingly intuitive but actually ineffective “solution” to a common problem that often already has a known, better solution.
This is a type of heuristic solution, a trial-and-error solution that is not guaranteed to yield optimal or perfect results, but in many cases is nevertheless very effective.
“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.”
Luckily, science gives us such a mental model for making sure we stay among the “fittest”: the scientific method. Formally, the scientific method is a rigorous cycle of making observations, formulating hypotheses, testing them, analyzing data, and developing new theories. But you can also apply it simply by embracing an experimental mindset. The most successful (and adaptive) people and organizations are constantly refining how they work and what they work on to be more effective.
By questioning your assumptions, you can adapt to new ways of thinking and overcome this personal inertia.
A model related to the strategy tax is the Shirky principle, named after economics writer Clay Shirky. The Shirky principle states, Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. An illustrative example is TurboTax, a U.S. company that makes filing taxes easier, but also lobbies against ideas that would make it easier to file taxes directly with the government. For example, “return-free filing,” a system in which the government would send you a pre-filled form based on information it already has available, would work well for most people. It is already a reality
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Quite simply, to be successful you need your organization’s culture to align with its strategy. As an organizational leader, you must recognize if there is a mismatch and act accordingly. As the U.S. government eventually did, you could create a new team with a different culture more fit for the strategy. You could abandon the strategy or pursue a modified strategy more aligned with the existing culture. Or you could try to change the culture over time, steering it toward the desired long-term strategy, recognizing that it may be a slow and challenging process.
The flywheel model tells you your efforts will have long-term benefits and will compound on top of previous efforts by yourself and others. It’s the tactical way to apply the concepts of momentum and inertia to your advantage.
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; it can also serve as a great catalyst, or forcing function, to reach the activation energy required
for a personal or organizational change.
Now we will discuss what often creates the underlying momentum behind new ideas as they permeate society: critical mass.
The point at which the system starts changing dramatically, rapidly gaining momentum, is often referred to as a tipping point.
In the same way that it is a lot easier to catch a fish if you cast a wide net, your personal luck surface area will increase as you interact with more people in more diverse situations.
Your luck surface area relates to the natural concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system.
These 2 × 2 matrices draw on a concept from physics called polarity, which describes a feature that has only two possible values. A magnet has a north and south pole. An electric charge can be positive or negative.
While polarity can be useful, when making comparisons you must be careful to avoid the black-and-white fallacy—thinking that things fall neatly into two groups when they do not.
This tendency arises because you often associate identity and self-esteem with group membership, thereafter creating in-group favoritism and, conversely, out-group bias.
You want to be somewhere in the middle of order and chaos, where you are intentionally raising your personal entropy enough to expose yourself to interesting opportunities and you are flexible and resilient enough to react to new conditions and paradigms that emerge.
