The Great Mental Models Volume 2

Relativity helps us to understand that there is more than one way to see everything. That doesn’t mean everyone’s perspective is equally valid, only that we might not have the most complete view into a problem or situation.

There is an objective reality, but none of us can perceive it in totality without doing a little work. Is it any wonder we make suboptimal decisions?

When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.

How other people frame something is their vantage point. It’s not an unobstructed description of reality, but rather their individual perspective.

Knowing the factors that influence how a person frames issues helps you understand their perspective and how you can use it to augment your own.

Perspective often comes from distance or time. If you’re trying to solve a problem and you’re stuck, try shifting your vantage point. Examples of this are moving up and contemplating the bigger picture, moving down and seeing more details, or assuming the perspective of other stakeholders—customers, suppliers, partners, government. Many problems become clearer if you extend the timeline. What does this situation look like in the weeks, months, and years ahead?

In physics, reciprocity is Newton’s third law, which states that for every force exerted by object A on object B, there is an equal but opposite force exerted by object B on object A.

Reciprocity can be summed up like this: when you act on things, they act on you.

The research on volunteering makes it clear that when we give, we get. We improve our physical health; we feel better about ourselves and our place in the world. We evaluate our lives as having more meaning.

If someone helps us, we’re quite happy to assist them the next time they need help. But if they ignore our plight when we need help, we’re highly unlikely to care in the inverse situation. For this reason, evolution tends to select for cooperative behavior in groups—it benefits everyone in the long run.

Humans engage in two types of reciprocity with each other: direct, which is “I help you and you help me;” and indirect, which is either a pay-it-forward concept, “I help you and then you help someone else,” or more about reputation building—“I help you, building a reputation as one who helps, so that someone else helps me in the future.” Both kinds work.

Reciprocity based on self-interest is still reciprocity. Engaging in positive behavior to then be a receiver of positive behavior is about the long game.

Reciprocity teaches us to be mindful of how our actions tend to come back on us. It’s important to remember that we are part of the world, and thus our actions do not happen in isolation, but are instead part of an interconnected web of effects.

We are drawn to stories that make things feel a little less random, just as we are drawn to storytellers who seemingly simplify complexity. We are all aware of disorder and the natural uncertainty that follows it and are attracted to stories that reduce it.

The end state of high entropy is also incompatible with life. Sensing this, we try to understand randomness and the unexplainable through stories that seem to put order back into our lives, thereby reducing entropy. Narratives are important. We use them to reduce chaos and stop us drifting too far from social order and cultural norms, which allows us to maintain our complex societies.

The phenomenon of inertia is the subject of Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, which states, “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

Inertia implies that once we stop doing something, getting started again is harder than continuing the whole time would have been.

Inertia also helps to explain why we continue on with bad habits and why it’s hard to make systematic change.

We stay at jobs we hate, avoid meaningful conversations with people of different opinions, and almost never change the religion our parents imposed on us at birth. All because it is easier to stay on our current path, however stagnant and unfulfilling it may be.—

The relevance of mass has analogous application in our habits. The longer we’ve been doing something, the more it has become part of both our identity and our understanding of the world. Thus, the amount of effort required to change

Getting started is the hardest part. Once something is moving in a direction, it’s much easier to keep it in motion. But once something is in motion, it’s hard to stop. The bigger the mass the more effort required.

No one wants to rush around, filling up their days with tasks and duties, then look up in twenty years and be in exactly the same place. We want to move somewhere so we can look back and identify the territory we’ve covered. This is why having a direction is so important: it lets us evaluate the usefulness of what we are doing by giving us a measurement of where we want to go.

Leverage is not a binary; something you either have or don’t have. Some people may use their leverage to get X. Some people may have the same leverage and use it to get X, Y, and Z. In order to use leverage to maximize your return, you need to figure out its potential and wield it wisely.

Instead, recognize that reactions do have an activation energy, and you have a greater chance of success when you consider what is needed to bring about not just the start, but the conclusion of a reaction.

If you have enough activation energy, reactions will keep going, finishing what was started and forming new bonds that will then take a significant reinvestment of activation energy to break. Real change takes effort. Invest more than you think you need to, and you just might get there.

There are many smaller catalysts that we encounter in our everyday lives. Getting out of breath while walking up a flight of stairs might be the catalyst for someone to start exercising. Reaching a significant birthday might prompt someone to make a career change. A health scare may push someone to improve their habits. For many people, unpleasant events, such as getting fired or rejected, prove to be catalysts for tremendous personal growth.

Catalysts accelerate reactions that are capable of occurring anyway. They decrease the amount of energy required to cause change, and in the process make possible reactions that might not have occurred otherwise. People and technologies often act as catalysts, increasing the pace of social change and development.

An alloy is a mixture, either in solution or compound, of two or more metals, or a metal and a nonmetal. Alloying, then, describes the process of creating an alloy. Alloying is done in order to synthesize a product with unique properties, such as greater strength, anticorrosion, service life, and improve performance.

With a successful alloy, one plus one can truly equal ten. The application of this model is relevant to everything from building teams to knowledge.

When we’re building something from scratch, we need to consider both the raw materials and how they mix together. A team where everyone has good ideas and nothing else won’t be as strong as a team that also includes someone who has an eye for which ideas are worth pursuing and the skills to make them a reality.

We start with what we get in terms of genetics and environment, but at a certain point we take over control of what we can become. Understanding that knowledge is an alloy of experience and theory that can be further strengthened with elements of curiosity, imagination and sharing gives us the ability to develop it as a true source of power in our lives.

If we resist adapting, we ultimately contribute to our own end. There is a constant interplay between environmental changes and a species’ response to them. The value of how a species responds is evaluated simply by survival. If we want to understand why some traits stick around, why some customs carry through many generations, and why some ideas take root and spread through a population, we have to look at their usefulness in their environment.

Adaptations are successful relative to their performance in a specific environment, relative to the pressure and competition the organisms face. We don’t have to be objectively best, just better than those we are competing against. “In other words, living things do only as well as they have to rather than optimize.”

On the human timescale, adaptability is about recognizing when the way you have done things in the past is becoming less and less successful in a changing environment. It requires you to innovate, like mutations in the evolution timescale, to see if you can come up with ideas that will improve your chances of success.

Every living thing is constantly on the lookout for opportunity, the place to accrue advantage, and thus adaptation is also driven as a response to changes in those with whom we share our environment. Staying the same as we are often means falling behind.

Complacency will kill you. The stronger we are relative to others, the less willing we generally are to change. We see strength as an immediate advantage that we don’t want to compromise. However, it’s not strength that survives, but adaptability. Strength becomes rigidity. Eventually your competitors will match your strength or find innovative ways to neutralize it. Real success comes from being flexible enough to change, to let go of what worked in the past, and to focus on what you need to thrive in the future.

One other fascinating property of ecosystems is that different organisms produce different systems, even if the environments are extremely similar. A desert in the Sudan does not have an identical look and operations to a desert in Australia. This concept might explain why teams following the same system do not necessarily produce the same results. As Michael Lombardi explains, “Many have tried to copycat Walsh’s offense by hiring his former assistants and associates or anyone else who could lay claim to the West Coast lineage, believing that simply employing someone to run the scheme is enough to create the kind of success Walsh had with it.” 28 Most of them failed. Why? Essentially, ingredients matter.

External stability is important for overall success. Even if you can’t control the external factors, you must pay attention to them. In order to have customers you need a large pool of people with enough money to buy your product. In order to run an office, you need a stable economic environment and tax system. In order to have employees, you need a strong education system that teaches the skills you require, and an urban structure that allows people to live a satisfying life on the income you provide. If we love our system, we must also do what we can to influence the external factors that are required to keep our system going.

We need to take the time to learn how the components of our system are interconnected so we can understand how our actions will impact the connections and affect the outcome we are trying to produce.

It is advantageous to be a specialist because they tend to have fewer competitors, whereas most of the generalists must compete against each other.

The generalist method is adequate if stakes are low, but increasing specialization is often mandated when the stakes—the standards of performance in competition—are high. » Geerat Vermeij2

If you never had the ability to send images, if you didn’t even know it was possible, then it isn’t something you were likely pining away for. Therefore, developers of fax technology identified and sought out small groups of potential users to create a market. Appeal to small, unrelated groups, was one of the main challenges for the technology for almost a hundred years. It was never very obvious who the technology would be extremely useful for.

It’s important to understand that it is the environment that makes the organism. When we look at the behavior of others, it’s easy to imagine we would never do the same if we find them abhorrent. For instance, a corrupt politician stealing aid money or a neighbor turning on a neighbor during a genocide. But it’s possible that if we were in the same niche, we would act in much the same way. It’s a lot easier to be empathetic if we look at the environment that shaped someone instead of merely considering the end result. To a certain extent, we are all more predictable than we would like to admit.

We misunderstand that equivalent problems tend to have equivalent solutions, as convergence shows us. Our own problems may feel unique, which leads us to ignore the solutions that worked for others in equivalent situations. Yet just as bats and birds found analogous ways to solve the problem of flight, often what works for others would work for us too.

Generalists face more daily competition, but they are more adaptable.

Specialists have less competition and stress, but only in times of stability. Generalists face a greater day-to-day challenge for resources and survival but have more flexibility to respond when times change.

Our hierarchical organizations are where we derive our ego, status, and reputation, and they are what conditions us to focus on growing ourselves rather than growing others.

In the absence of an imposed structure, people have a natural instinct to self-organize. In organizations that claim to have a flat structure with no leaders, people often just end up more frazzled than normal as they attempt to navigate the inevitable unspoken power structures.

Hierarchies are critical in survival situations and in combat. In these scenarios, we primally crave leadership. In chaotic, life-and-death situations, sheepdogs magically appear to herd the sheep.

The person at the back, feeding the ball to others, may look like a servant—but that person is actually creating dependency. The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve.”

Consistent but infrequent rewards can create stronger behavioral changes than those that are given all the time.

The instinct to minimize energy output can lead us to be resistant to change or risk-taking. Using this model as a lens help us better understand our default thinking tendencies,

In a process known as “satisficing,” we’ll often search for the first thing in our brain that satisfies our minimum acceptable conditions. This saves time and energy, but it doesn’t mean we get the best outcome.

We need to develop mechanisms that promote efficiency in the ongoing, repetitive activities we undertake every day.

If we want to develop our thinking and get the most out of our environments, then we have to be aware of the natural tendency to minimize energy output and correct for it where doing so creates value.

We recommend journaling your successes as well as your failures to stimulate learning from your experiences. While most people assume that experience is the key to learning, the key is actually reflection. Journaling works because it prompts reflection.