Peter Hollins - Mental Models

📖 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45027848

MMs

1. Address "Important"; Ignore "Urgent" to separate priorities from impostors
2. Visualize All the Dominoes to make decisions as informed as possible
3. Make Reversible Decisions to remove indecisions and have a bias to action
4. Seek "Satisfiction" to achieve your priorities and ignore what doesn't matter
5. Stay within 40% - 70% to balance information with action
6. Minimize Regret by consulting the future you on decisions
7. Ignore "Black Swans" to understand how outliers shouldn't change your thinking
8. Look for Equilibrium Points to find real patterns in data and not be fooled
9. Wait for the Regression to the Mean to find real patterns in data and not be fooled
10. What Would Bayes Do to calculate probabilities and predict the future based on real events
11. Do It Like Darwin to seek real, honest truth in a situation
12. Think With System 2 to think analytically instead of emotionally
13. Peer Review Your Perspectives to understand the consensus view and why you might differ
14. Find Your Own Flaws to scrutinize yourself before others can
15. Separate Correlation From Causation to understand what truly needs to be addressed to solve a problem

Decision Making For Speed And Context

To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

• Abraham Maslow

A mental model is a blueprint to emphasize important aspects of whatever you're facing, and it defines context, background and direction.

Without them, you are only able to see the haphazard, individual elements with no connection to each other.

A chef is someone who has the mental models of flavor profiles, what basic ingredients are needed for a stock or a sauce, typical techniques for different meats, and the conventional beverage and food pairings.

You can think of mental models as life heuristics or guidelines to evaluate and comprehend.

Mental models aren't perfect representations of the world around us, they serve to separate the signal from the noise for a specific perspective.

Too few mental models limit your capability to comprehend.

MM #13: Peer Review Your Perspectives to understand the consensus view and why you might differ

The goal of peer reviews is to guard inaccuracies or omissions in a final work and to offer alternative viewpoints that could help make the results clearer, more relevant, or precise.

The more vicious a peer review against your work might be, the more helpful it could be.

The best peer reviews leave no stones unturned and make sure the originator is presenting work that's been subjected to as much examination as possible.

Collecting data points from all sides leads you closer to the reality. The more different the sources the better.

Subjecting your ideas to peer review increases your legitimacy and authenticity.