This page collates the mental models that I've repeatedly found useful in my day-to-day decision making.
- Shape the Environment: Make it easy for people to do the right things; make it difficult for people to do the wrong things. Set up systems, not goals. A goal without a routine is worthless.
- Small Improvements: Frequently making small incremental improvements is a better approach than attempting to fix big looming problems once. Time makes anything possible. What you do with your time is most important.
- Cost Benefit Analysis: Prioritize things that cost little but has high impact.
- Pareto Principle: For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The last 20% takes 80% of the time.
- Business Case: Captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. “Why this now?”
- Divide and Conquer: Anything is possible, doing so is just a process of reduction. Wiggins’ Law: If it’s hard, cut scope.
- Leverage: With a small amount of input force at the right place, we can make a great output through leverage.
- Face the Dragon: That which you need will be found where you least want to look. Fear is but the precursor to valor, that we triumph even in the face of fear.
- Bias for Action: The best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. The only true failure is not to act at all.
- Inertia: The tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at constant velocity. If you don’t take the first step, a path won’t open for you. Let your every step form the path of your growth.
- Keep the Flame Burning: Those who try to achieve their dreams must go through hardship. There may come times when you fail and lose sight of that dream. But you must let the flame in your chest go out. Burn that flame bright, and strive for your ideal place.
- Activation Energy: Certain chemical reactions require the input of a critical level of activation energy via catalysts to get started.
- Emergence: Whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. (The sum is greater than individual parts.)
- First-Conclusion Bias: Our tendency to settle on first conclusions leads us to accept many erroneous results and cease asking questions. Generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.
- Pygmalion Effect: The phenomenon whereby higher expectations lead to an increase in performance.
- Optimize for Learning: Life is study. There is pleasure in finding things out. Learning happens contextually as you figure things out.
- Growth Mindset: Those with a ‘fixed mindset’ believe that abilities are mostly innate and interpret failure as the lack of necessary basic abilities, while those with a ‘growth mindset’ believe that they can acquire any given ability provided they invest effort or study.
- The Feynman Technique: Teaching a topic to someone else is an excellent way to learn.
- Narrative Instinct: Long before humans developed the ability to write or to create objects, we were telling stories and thinking in stories.
- Incentives: Something that motivates an individual to perform an action. All creatures respond to incentives.
- Trust: Fundamentally, the modern world operates on trust.
- Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.
- Circle of Competence: Each individual tends to have core competencies for which they really know their stuff. Take care when making decisions outside of that circle. Do what you’re genuinely interested in and try to play to your natural strengths.
- Opportunity Costs: The ‘cost’ incurred by not enjoying the benefit that would have been had by taking the second best available choice We live in a world of trade-offs.
- Sunk Cost: A cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.
- Comparative Advantage: Two individuals, firms, or countries could benefit from trading with one another even if one of them was better at everything.
- Law of Diminishing Returns: Most things are subject to an eventual decrease of incremental value.
- Make it real: Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe, provide a URL.
- Minimum Remarkable Product: A product with just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development. Be frugal and focus on your customers.
- Ship it: Nothing is real until it’s being used by a real user. Find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it. Launch when your product is better than what’s out there.
- Product / Market Fit: The degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. Do things that don’t scale until you reach this point. Nail it, then scale it.
- Ignore the competition: Except to borrow good ideas.
- Deliberate Practice: How expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times.
- Strong opinions, weakly held: Creating something of true significance starts with seeing things others do not. Have a strong opinion and argue passionately for it. But when you encounter new information, be willing to change your mind.
- The Map is not the Territory: There will always be an imperfect relationship between reality and the models we use to represent and understand it.
- Love: When you’re in love with something, you sparkle. Who would come to love your singing, if you don’t like it yourself?
- There’s no way there’s no way. You’ll figure it out.