Super Thinking

I recently read a book called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann. This book outlined many mental models that can be applied to a diversity of situations in one’s life. The aim of mental models are to help one think through decisions more quickly and arrive at better solutions. This booked emphasized applying the mental models to your life to build a lattice work of concepts that can be pulled out in the appropriate context.

What are mental models? Well, models are representations of things. Like a model home is a representation of the type of place you could live in or a fashion model is a person that displays clothes and how they could look. So mental models are a way of thinking that represents one’s understanding of a system and provides one with an expectation for how that system will respond. For example, understanding concepts from Physics like inertia can help you think through why some change is more difficult than others. Inertia, which is often defined as “an object at rest will stay at rest and an object at motion will stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force”, can be used as a metaphor for change. Inertia is based around mass, so something with a lot of mass (e.g., political affiliation) will have a lot of inertia and thus be hard change. Something with little inertia (e.g., brand of dish soap someone uses) may have little mass to it and so may be more easily changed.

This book has 9 chapters, and I will make 9 blog posts that introduce and explain some of the key concepts I derived from each chapter. The aim of these blog posts will be to choose mental models that will help you reduce uncertainty and hopefully make better decisions in your day-to-day life.

If you are interested in mental models, I highly recommend reading this book.