Want To Avoid Bad Decisions? Here’s How Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Stick to What they Know. We all want to avoid making bad decisions. We want to avoid making bad investments. Avoid failure, losing money, etc. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (may he Rest in Peace) have a mental model for this. It’s called … Read more
Want To Deepen Your Thinking? Here Are a 19th Century Mathematician’s 2 Approaches For Thinking Through Problems. Carl Jacobi was a 19th century mathematician who was famous for inventing the mental model: Inversion. While he used this for mathematics, it has broad applications outside of math as well. What’s so great about this principle is … Read more
Want To Eliminate Unnecessary Complexity? Here Are a Medieval Monk’s 4 Rules For Simplicity William of Ockham was an interesting guy. Born in 1287 in Ockham, Surrey (where he got his name), he studied theology at Oxford, was a philosopher, logician, and a Franciscan Friar. Due to some disagreements with the papacy on certain catholic … Read more
Want To Make Decisions Faster? Here Are Jeff Bezos’s 2 Rules For Decision Making Jeff Bezos has a process for making decisions. He asks if a decision is a one-way door or a two-way door. What’s so great about this principle is that it provide guidance on how much deliberation should go into a decision. … Read more
Want To Make Higher Quality Decisions? Here Are Famed Investor and Oaktree Capital Co-Founder Howard Marks’s 5 Rules For Better Decision Making Howard Marks has a process for making better investment decisions. He uses the mental model: Second Order Thinking. This mental model provides a great toolset for thinking through a decision more thoroughly, and … Read more
Want to Learn Faster and More Deeply? Here Is a Mental Model Used by Famous Tech Entrepreneurs, Philosophers, and Physicists. What does Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Immanuel Kant and Richard Feynman all have in common? They all use the same mental model for deep learning and solving complex problems: First Principles Thinking. What’s awesome about … Read more
Know the Limits of Your Tooling. Here Are Philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s 4 Rules For Navigating Reality Alfred Korzybski was a philosopher and scholar from the early 20th century. He invented the mental model: “The Map is Not the Territory”. What’s so great about this principle is it teaches us the limits of tools and guides. … Read more
Dealing with a complicated problem? Learn this little-known decision framework used by executives, militaries and software development teams. The Cynefin (pronounced ku-nev-in) Framework is a surprisingly little-known problem solving framework. But it gives you superpowers in figuring out how to approach problems of any size or complexity. What’s so great about it is that it … Read more
Want to get better at knowing which projects to continue and which to quit? Here are Astro Teller’s 4 rules for vetting a project. Astro Teller, CEO of X Development (fka Google X) has a process for keeping or killing projects. He uses the mental model: “Monkeys and Pedestals”. What’s so great about this principle … Read more