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Mental Models

Activation Energy: Why Getting Started Is the Hardest Part

The beginning of any complex or challenging endeavor is always the hardest part. Not all of us wake up and jump out of bed ready for the day. Some of us, like me, need a little extra energy to transition out of sleep and into the day. Once …

Read moreActivation Energy: Why Getting Started Is the Hardest Part

Counterinsurgency: Fighting Back

The Basics For an accurate definition of counterinsurgency (and the flipside, insurgency), we can look to one of the definitive texts on the topic. In Counterinsurgency, David Kilcullen writes: An insurgency, according to the current US …

Read moreCounterinsurgency: Fighting Back

All Models Are Wrong

How is your journey towards understanding Farnam Street’s latticework of mental models going? Is it proving useful? Changing your view of the world? If the answer is that it’s going well that’s good. There’s just one tiny hitch. All models …

Read moreAll Models Are Wrong

Mutually Assured Destruction: When Not to Play

Mutually assured destruction is a military mental model with powerful applications in life and business. It refers to a situation where two parties are in a stalemate, and neither can make a move without causing their own destruction. …

Read moreMutually Assured Destruction: When Not to Play

People Don’t Follow Titles: Necessity and Sufficiency in Leadership

“Colonel Graff: You have a habit of upsetting your commander. Ender Wiggin: I find it hard to respect someone just because they outrank me, sir.” — Orson Scott Card *** Many leaders confuse necessary conditions for leadership …

Read morePeople Don’t Follow Titles: Necessity and Sufficiency in Leadership

Leverage: Gaining Disproportionate Strength

“It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract *** The …

Read moreLeverage: Gaining Disproportionate Strength

Understanding the Limitations of Maps

Maps are flawed but useful. For instance, we can leverage the experiences of others to help us navigate through territories that are, to us, new and unknown. We just have to understand and respect the inherent limitations of maps whose …

Read moreUnderstanding the Limitations of Maps

Proximate vs Root Causes: Keep Digging to Find the Answer

“Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.” — Arthur Schopenhauer *** The Basics One of the first principles we learn as babies is that of cause and effect. Infants …

Read moreProximate vs Root Causes: Keep Digging to Find the Answer

Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence

Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas. Confirmation bias explains why two people with opposing views on a topic can see the same evidence and come away feeling validated by …

Read moreConfirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence

Galilean Relativity and the Invasion of Scotland

A few centuries ago, when Galileo (1564-1642) was trying to make a couple of points about how our world really works, one of the arguments that frequently came up in response to his ‘the earth orbits the sun’ theory was “if the earth is …

Read moreGalilean Relativity and the Invasion of Scotland

Cleopatra and Self-Preservation

“For the last time in two thousand years Cleopatra VII stands offstage. In a matter of days she will launch herself into history, which is to say that faced with the inevitable, she will counter with the improbable. It is 48 BC.” — Stacy …

Read moreCleopatra and Self-Preservation

Emergence and Power — Four 13th-Century Sisters Who Became Queens

“[S]ome systems … are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial push you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback, so that what a system does affects its …

Read moreEmergence and Power — Four 13th-Century Sisters Who Became Queens

Hanlon’s Razor: Relax, Not Everything is Out to Get You

Hanlon’s Razor teaches us not to assume the worst intention in the actions of others. Understanding Hanlon’s Razor helps us see the world in a more positive light, stop negative assumptions, and improve relationships. Let’s take a …

Read moreHanlon’s Razor: Relax, Not Everything is Out to Get You

Let Go of Self-Justification

Our desire to justify our actions and believe we’ve always done the right thing can lead us to distort our view of reality. We prefer preserving our self-image to seeing the truth. Here’s how to let go of self-justification. *** It can be …

Read moreLet Go of Self-Justification

Tribal Leadership: The Key To Building Great Teams

Have you ever wondered about internal organization dynamics and why some groups of people (who aren’t on the same team) are more successful than others? Why different “tribes” inside the organization seem to be at war with …

Read moreTribal Leadership: The Key To Building Great Teams

Immigration, Extinction, and Island Equilibrium

Equilibrium is an important concept that permeates many disciplines. In chemistry we think about the point where the rate of forward reaction is equal to the rate of backward reaction. In economics we think of the point where supply equals …

Read moreImmigration, Extinction, and Island Equilibrium

Batesian Mimicry: Why Copycats Are Successful

One of our first interview guests for The Knowledge Project was the former NFL executive Michael Lombardi. In our interview, we discussed topics ranging from the nature of leadership to decision making in a football context. Mike is one of …

Read moreBatesian Mimicry: Why Copycats Are Successful

The Green Lumber Fallacy: The Difference between Talking and Doing

“All that glitters is not gold,” the saying goes. The aesthetics of things often fool us. People we call ignorant might not be ignorant. People we call smart might not be smart. The Green Lumber Fallacy teaches us that the real …

Read moreThe Green Lumber Fallacy: The Difference between Talking and Doing

Using Multidisciplinary Thinking to Approach Problems in a Complex World

Complex outcomes in human systems are a tough nut to crack when it comes to deciding what’s really true. Any phenomena we might try to explain will have a host of competing theories, many of them seemingly plausible. So how do we know …

Read moreUsing Multidisciplinary Thinking to Approach Problems in a Complex World

Peter Bevelin on Seeking Wisdom, Mental Models, Learning, and a Lot More

One of the most impactful books we’ve ever come across is the wonderful Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, written by the Swedish investor Peter Bevelin. In the spirit of multidisciplinary learning, Seeking Wisdom is a compendium …

Read morePeter Bevelin on Seeking Wisdom, Mental Models, Learning, and a Lot More

What Are You Doing About It? Reaching Deep Fluency with Mental Models

The mental models approach is very intellectually appealing, almost seductive to a certain type of person. (It certainly is for us.) The whole idea is to take the world’s greatest, most useful ideas and make them work for you! How …

Read moreWhat Are You Doing About It? Reaching Deep Fluency with Mental Models

Bias from Disliking/Hating

(This is a follow-up to our post on the Bias from Liking/Loving, which you can find here.) Think of a cat snarling and spitting, lashing with its tail and standing with its back curved. Her pulse is elevated, blood vessels constricted and …

Read moreBias from Disliking/Hating

Bias from Liking/Loving: Why We Comply With Those We Love

The decisions that we make are rarely impartial. Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like. We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we like. The tendency to judge in favor of …

Read moreBias from Liking/Loving: Why We Comply With Those We Love

Mental Model: Bias from Conjunction Fallacy

The bias from conjunction fallacy is a common reasoning error in which we believe that two events happening in conjunction is more probable than one of those events happening alone. Here’s why this happens and how we can overcome the …

Read moreMental Model: Bias from Conjunction Fallacy
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