The Best Mental Models
Reasoning by analogy, or copying what others are doing, is sort of like being a cover band where you’re playing somebody else’s music. Whereas with first-principles thinking, you go back to the fundamental raw materials of music, which are the notes, and then you build an original song from scratch. That is first-principles thinking.
Lenny Rachitsky • First-Principles Thinking
Species tend to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, given the combination of their genetics and their environment – an always-unavoidable combination. However, adaptations made in an individual’s lifetime are not passed down genetically, as was once thought: Populations of species adapt through the process of evolution by natural selec... See more
authority • Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions
The Red Queen Effect
A Margin of Safety: How to Thrive in the Age of Uncertainty
jamesclear.com
The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated (Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing Series)
amazon.com
Moat:
“An intrinsic characteristic that gives the business a durable competitive advantage” - Munger
Rather than focusing on having a brilliant day, why not consider what a crap day would look like and avoid that? It will likely be easier and will achieve similar results. Or, as Charles Munger pointed out: "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very... See more
Inversion
The map is not the territory is a mental model that reminds us not to confuse a model of a situation with the situation itself.
Your Innovator’s Toolkit: The map is not the territory
This is what mental models are: ideas from diverse fields that can aid your life. In this sense, improving vocabulary is a meta mental model. It’s a way of finding and organising new mental models.