The reason I’m sending these emails is that I’m challenging myself to write my thoughts to make sense of the world around me. Also, I know that some people have only discovered this road. But it doesn’t mean they share the same experience. Many people travel to the same places, but everyone sees things differently.
Many methods and strategies are already out there waiting to be digested and turned into practice. Yet we don’t take the time to look outside, apply what we find, and make our decision-making easier and better, resulting in a less risky, more rewarding, wealthy, and delighted life.
But…
The situation often seems like a giant tangled ball of yarn threads—it is impossible to know where to start. Whenever we begin untangling a thread, another mess appears. However, I finally found a thread to pull, which split the ball into pieces.
A few years back, I learned two words that not suddenly but progressively changed the direction of my life. Researching what lies underneath these two words and practicing what I have learned enhanced not only my life but also those of others around me. Those two words were mental models.
Mental models are frameworks for understanding and interpreting the world around us. They help us reflect reality correctly, eliminate misperceptions, and guide our thought processes.
A good example is Chesterton’s fence: it tells you to understand the reasons behind an established practice. Software engineers tend to rewrite already working code to make it more modern. People often trust themselves too much and remove some seemingly unnecessary parts of the code during the rewrite, resulting in bugs. Thinking with Chesterton’s fence, they pause before deleting the old code and ask, “Why was the code designed like this in the first place?” And that question is the essence. The answer will reveal valuable information that is often missed.
Another mental model is second-order thinking, used to understand decisions’ ripple effects and long-term consequences. In first-order thinking, we look for what would happen if we decide on something, focusing on immediate results. In second-order thinking, we look for the consequences of the results. We actively think about the indirect effects the first decision will cause later. In the above example, engineers can rewrite the code in various ways. Using this mental model, they can choose the best strategy to prepare the code for the future.
The existence of mental models was probably the best thing I’ve ever learned so far. Knowing various mental models across disciplines, such as physics, economics, psychology, business, and systems and complexity theories, helps me make sense of the world around me. (We’ll not get into all of them, but I’ll write about them from time to time and introduce you to a few crucial ones.)
As Charlie Munger, one of the best investors who have ever lived, says in his talk on April 14, 1994:
“You can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”
The goal is neither memorizing the facts of the world nor mental models but to use these models to turn the information we have been bombarded with into well-shaped knowledge.
Here is a quick list of mental models from the Farnam Street Blog. Bookmark the link, skim it through, read a few models here and there, or indulge in them.
Until next time, Candost
P.S. A marvelous book is available free on a greatly designed website.
Some Things I Found Great
The Need to Read: I agree with Paul Graham, who says, “People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can’t afford to.” The more I read and write, the more I think reading outweighs all other methods (e.g., watching a video or listening to a podcast).
Omnivore App: I’ve been using Omnivore for a few months now, and it has taken its place as my go-to reading list and content aggregator tool. I use it for RSS, email subscriptions, and saving articles to read them later.
Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems with Architecture for Flow: A good watch for the people in software engineering leadership positions if you want to learn how to combine several management frameworks with software architecture.