Mental Model

Frameworks for understanding how the world works - tools for clearer thinking and better decisions.

12 concepts

Chesterton's Fence

Before you remove something, make sure you understand why it was put there in the first place.

Knowing the boundaries of what you genuinely understand - and having the discipline to stay inside them when it matters.

Breaking a problem down to its most basic truths and building up from there, rather than reasoning by analogy.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance, carelessness, or incompetence.

Forming your own judgement about an idea or claim before looking at what everyone else thinks.

Instead of asking how to succeed, ask what would guarantee failure - then avoid those things.

Every model, theory, or description of reality is a simplification - useful, but never the whole picture.

When you have competing explanations for the same thing, the simplest one - the one with the fewest assumptions - is usually right.

Every choice has a hidden price tag: the value of the next-best thing you gave up by choosing this one.

Thinking in terms of likelihoods and ranges of outcomes rather than certainties, so you make better decisions under uncertainty.

Thinking beyond the immediate consequences of a decision to consider what happens next - and what happens after that.

The unconscious belief about whether people are fundamentally selfish or fundamentally cooperative - and how that shapes everything else you think.