Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions

The more tools you have in your mental toolbox, the more likely you are to make better decisions. In turn, better decisions should free up your time and help you live a more meaningful life.

Why are more complicated explanations less likely to be true? Let’s work it out mathematically. Take two competing explanations, each of which seem to equally explain a given phenomenon. If one of them requires the interaction of three variables and the other the interaction of thirty variables, all of which must have occurred to arrive at the stat

There has been a growing understanding about human cognitive biases and how they can affect decision making. Many of these are systematized and explained in Daniel Kahneman’s fascinating book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.4 For senior executives the most important seem to be optimism bias, confirmation bias, and the inside-view bias.

Mental models describe the way the world works. They shape how we think, how we understand, and how we form beliefs.