One brain, one life
Why is it important to think about how we think? For starters, the six inches between your ears contains the most complex supercomputer the world has even known. Our brains are capable of storing 2,500 terabytes of information (2.5 million gigabytes) with cognitive capabilities that would make an AI programmer blush.
However, our human attention spans are dwindling, and it’s been proven that our brains are painfully susceptible to bias.
To truly unleash our brain’s super powers—and avoid some inherently bad thinking due to evolutionary “design flaws”—we must learn to think about how we think.
How to think about thinking
Thankfully, there are ample resources to get us started on this exponentially beneficial path. One of my personal favorites, first recommended to me by good friend Chris Escher, is the Farnam Street website created by Shane Parrish.
Drawing deep inspiration from Charlie Munger, Farnam Street published Mental Models: The Best Ways To Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Explained). Shane took the time to identify, consolidate, organize and describe various mental models in a digestible format. It looks like this:
Source: Farnam Street
A few to focus on
I think we can all agree that 109 mental models is a lot. But the more we can invite these frameworks into our day to day, the better our thinking will become which ultimately results in better decision making.
“Decision making is everything,” noted Naval Ravikant in a recent interview with Shane Parrish (Farnam Street generously published the entire transcript for free here). With Naval’s comment in mind, I recommend scampering down the impressive list of 109 mental models to the Human Nature & Judgement section.
Here you can find 25 of the most practical and applicable mental models for everyday life (they’re all valuable in their own way, I just recommend starting with something we do everyday: make decisions).
Source: Farnam Street
Further reading
For those interested in a deep dive into business decision making, I recommend the book Judgment in Managerial Decision Making (Bazerman, Moore). Paradoxically, this book is incredibly dense, yet also thin. It reads like a STEM text book, and the payoff is you’ll get a bachelors in business decision making with exceptionally detailed exercises, quizzes and math problems. Fantastic stuff.
Often soporific, this book is a supreme bedside companion, conjuring up dreams of brain-twisting heuristics and (un)bounded awareness. it’s sure to improve any library or Kindle.
You are your decisions
Right now, your life is the result of the decisions you’ve made. Mental models are one way to think about thinking, so that your decision-making quality improves. The good people of Farnam Street also recommend tracking your decisions in a decision journal (hard copy also available for $8.95) so that at the end of the year, you can know (objectively) the quality of your decisions.
Of course, documenting all of your major decisions would require discipline (new habit!), but wouldn’t it be worth it?