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Mental Models

Mental Models — Why They Are Important (Part 1)

Regis Nisengwe

• 1 min read
Mental Models — Why They Are Important (Part 1)
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The Great Mental Models (Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts) is a great book by Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien. In the words the authors, Mental models “are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.”

Below are some of the quotes I picked from the book so far:

  • The author and explorer of mental models, Peter Bevelin, put it best: “I don’t want to be a great problem solver. I want to avoid problems—prevent them from happening and doing it right from the beginning.”
  • « Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities. » Andy Benoit
  • Sometimes making good decisions boils down to avoiding bad ones.
  • « The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem. » Alain de Botton
  • What successful people do is file away a massive, but finite, amount of fundamental, established, essentially unchanging knowledge that can be used in evaluating the infinite number of unique scenarios which show up in the real world.
  • On the three buckets of knowledge and sample sizes we can access:
What Can the Three Buckets of Knowledge Teach Us About History? “Every statistician knows that a large, relevant sample size is their best friend. What are the three largest, most relevant sample sizes for identifying universal principles? Bucket number one is inorganic systems, which are 13.7 billion years in size. It’s all the laws of math and physics, the entire physical universe. Bucket number two is organic systems, 3.5 billion years of biology on Earth. And bucket number three is human history, you can pick your own number, I picked 20,000 years of recorded human behavior. Those are the three largest sample sizes we can access and the most relevant.” — Peter Kaufman