Transcription
Let's talk about mental models. Now, when I say mental models, I'm not talking about people in the fashion industry that are a little bit like crazy. Did you get it? Mental mental models? What I'm talking about are ideas or frameworks that you can use to be more effective at making decisions. These are models that we can learn from the areas of psychology, economics, behavioral science, and philosophy that enable us to be able to see through problems in a new way.
And so, over the course of this episode and a follow-up episode in a couple of weeks' time, I'm going to dive into these mental models. We're going to talk about 25 in each episode. So this episode is going to be as packed full of wisdom as any episode that we've ever done on the Changing Minds podcast. I'm telling you, this is going to be one of the most useful podcast episodes you've ever tuned into. So get ready; this one's going to be a banger.
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Changing Minds podcast. My name is Owen Fitzpatrick, and today we're going to be diving into the world of mental models. Now, a mental model is a representation or framework that individuals use to understand, explain, or make better predictions in the world. They're wonderful techniques or tools that we can use to be able to solve problems more effectively, to be able to make better decisions.
And over the course of this episode—and this is one of two parts—I'm going to be diving into 25 different mental models. In a couple of weeks, we'll do another part where I'll dive into another 25. But this is going to be packed full of wisdom from a number of well-known figures that we've extracted quite a lot of wonderful lessons and learnings from.
To start off with, let me just give you a little bit of background in terms of what this idea of a mental model is all about. Shane Parish, a well-known author who wrote a recent book called *Clear Thinking*—an excellent book—he also co-wrote a book called *Mental Models*, and there were three volumes of them. And this is something that he became well known for. He has a website called Farnam Street, and Farnam Street is named after, I think, it was a house that Warren Buffett lived on, or certainly it was where Berkshire Hathaway—Warren Buffett's company that he shares with—shared with Charlie Munger. These are two very well-known, very successful billionaires in terms of investment.
Anyway, this guy Shane Parish, who was formerly in sort of the NSA of Canada many years ago, well, he became fascinated with a lot of the lessons that he was learning from, especially Charlie Munger, but also Buffett. And what he found was is that there was a lot of these—as Munger I think described them—as mental models. These are sort of rules of thumb, or ideas, or strategies, or frameworks that could be used to be able to help us to make better decisions. And he started compiling it on this website, Farnam Street. You can still access the Farnam Street website, and as I said, he also wrote a number of books on it.
Now, I've also heard that the idea or the term mental models is used in a lot of other contexts as well. For example, on Chris Williamson's podcast, *Modern Wisdom*—an excellent podcast—he interviews a guy called George Mack a number of times discussing mental models. So, once again, from the work of Shane Parish, from the work of the conversations and discussions that Chris had with George, we've got a number of those insights and mental models that we're sharing that they first discussed on various different episodes. There there's also mental models that have been extracted from the work of Naval Ravikant. There's a great book called *The Almanac of Naval Ravikant*, which is excellent. He's well known in the startup and tech industry. There's Alex Hormozi, who's well known in the marketing industry, and once again, there's a few ideas he's shared. There's Annie Duke, who I've extracted a few mental models from. Annie, of course, is the former professional poker player that is the author of a number of incredible books, including *Thinking in Bets*, one of the best books out there in the area of decision-making and behavioral economics. And there's also such figures like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is the author of books like *The Black Swan* and *Antifragile*. There's Charlie Munger, of course; Warren Buffett, as we mentioned; there's Rob Henderson again, who has been interviewed a number of times on *Modern Wisdom*; there's also Dr. Richard Bandler, obviously my mentor, who shared with me a lot of great insights.
And these are just some of the people—I'm name-dropping a lot of different names out there because I do want to offer you the understanding that these mental models are not something that I'm bringing to the world. There's a few ideas in there, a few of the mental models that I've sort of coined myself, but even those are based upon lessons and learnings that I've learned over the years from a variety of different sources.
And so, with that in mind, we're going to dive into 25 different mental models today that you're going to find exceptionally useful in life, and I'm going to walk you through not only what those mental models are but give you examples of how you can apply them. So, by the end of this episode, you're going to walk away, and you're probably going to want to watch this back or listen to this back because you're going to have an infinite array of different ideas as to how you can start to apply a lot of the things that we talked about.
And so, let's talk about mental model one. And mental model one actually comes from someone I haven't mentioned yet, but someone who is a person that I have a massive amount of respect for and spend a lot of time studying her work: it's the wonderful neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Now, Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about the constructivist view of emotions and really has a very different take on how emotions are made. Done a massive amount of research to show that we actually construct a lot of the emotions we feel. It's not that emotions happen to us, but the first mental model we're going to extract from Lisa is the notion, or what I call, the law of affective realism. And affective realism is something that she's mentioned a number of times in a couple of the books she's written. Affective realism is this notion that we see reality through the lens of how we feel. In other words, the way in which we feel can dictate what parts of reality we see. We interpret the world differently when we're feeling differently.
And anyone has ever been hangry—have you ever been angry where you haven't eaten and you're like starving and you're like snapping at people? I certainly know I have. Or you're tired—you're what I call tangry—you're tired; you wake up in the morning, you haven't slept enough, and you're like snapping. Or those people that like, "Don't talk to me before 10:00 in the morning. If you talk to me before 10:00 in the morning, I'm going to bite your head off," right? Because they're so tired and they react negatively. And okay, they're self-aware enough to know, but what all of this, all of these people have in common, and what we all have in common whenever our biology affects our mood, is that what happens is is that the affect—affect, a-f-f-e-c-t—and this dictates what we pay attention to, and this ensures that the way in which we perceive reality is totally different. So you could see the exact same event, but based upon how you feel, you see it in two totally different ways.
Now, remember, whenever you are in a certain emotional state, that also will call to attention all of the negative stories that you have. So, for example, if you feel bad about yourself, your brain will be reminding you of all the stories about how much of a useless person you are, whereas when you're in a positive, healthy, happy state, your brain will be reminding you of all the great things that are in your life and all the wonderful reasons why you are actually a legend. But because of that, whenever you experience any experience, but you're feeling a certain way, you will interpret that according to the narratives of the stories that you're telling yourself, which in turn will be guided by the affect that you feel.
So this notion of affective realism is something we need to recognize, and how it's useful is to immediately understand that whatever way you're interpreting a problem or challenge or even a decision is influenced by the feeling that you're feeling at that moment in time. So you need to do a check with yourself and go, "What am I feeling right now physically? How am I?" And if you want to make a good decision—and Doctor Richard Bandler would always share this with me—is always try to make good decisions from a good place. So try to create a good state before you make a good decision, because invariably whenever we feel bad, more often than not that bad feeling can lead us to make bad decisions, which in turn can give us bad realities or experiences, which in turn can reinforce the bad feeling. So it's vital that we're able to change our state and to be able to make better decisions in better ways, ensuring that we handle this sort of what I call the law of affective reality.
So that's the first mental model that is really, really helpful and really, really useful. The second mental model is what we know is the law of contrast. Now, this is originally something covered by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, in 1954 or so, and Festinger is known—he's a psychologist who's known for the social comparison theory—and this is the idea that people evaluate their own opinions and their own abilities by comparing themselves to other people. But the law of contrast is something that Robert Cialdini, in his book *Influence*—this classic book written on the psychology of persuasion—what he starts out the book with before he goes into the seven principles of influence, he first talks about this law of contrast and how contrast dictates, to a large extent, how we evaluate different things. Charlie Munger would talk quite a lot about this, but Charlie Munger was also a big fan of Cialdini's book *Influence*, and so there's a lot of connections there. But in a nutshell, this is really powerful. And a simple example would be if I said to you—let's imagine whatever you do—I said to you, "Okay, you're going to get an increase in your salary, or an increase in whatever you pay yourself if you're self-employed, and you're going to do that, you're going to get an increase of 50%," you'd probably be delighted. But if I told you that everybody else around you was going to get a 75% increase, all of a sudden what looked good because you're comparing it to where you are, all of a sudden it looks bad. So whatever we compare ourselves to will dictate how we feel about whatever we have. And the problem is now we're living in a world where we go on social media, and you go on Instagram, and everyone's loving their life, everyone's living #blessedlife, where they're living their best, and they're going on vacation and going on holidays all the time. They will share whenever something amazing happens. It looks like everyone except for you is killing it. It looks like everyone except for you is having fun. It looks like everyone except for you is madly in love. And the problem with that is is that you're comparing your worst with their best. And this law of contrast means it's very easy for us to feel bad even if we're doing good, because what we're comparing ourselves to… some of the research studies have shown that when you walk around or you spend some time with people in need, while one of the benefits that you get is the feeling of satisfaction of giving to those people, it's also you're comparing yourself to some degree to those people, and you're thinking to yourself, "How lucky am I that I have this in life, and all of these poor people are sick, or they're poor, or they're struggling in some other way." So it's important for us to recognize the power of contrast. And whenever we feel bad, whenever we feel angry, whenever we feel depressed, whenever we feel inadequate, whenever we feel insecure, ask yourself, "Who are you comparing yourself to? Who are you contrasting your experience with?" And I guarantee you, whoever you're comparing yourself with, more than likely you're going to find yourself feeling bad as a result of that. So that's the second mental model.
The third mental model is when we look at the notion of doublethink. Now, doublethink was popularized by George Orwell in his wonderful book, *1984*—classic book—but I first heard—I think it was George Mack and Chris Williamson who were talking on Chris's podcast, *Modern Wisdom*, and they were talking about this notion of doublethink as a mental model. And the notion is is your ability to be able to hold two things as true, two paradoxical ideas as true at the same time, which is of course what the character in *1984* had to do, living in that political minefield. And what George Mack described it as is he said, "Instead of like this notion of, 'Oh, black or white thinking is bad,' or 'Thinking in the gray is the best idea'"—and I've said that before in podcast episodes—"he suggested the gray isn't necessarily a good approach to a lot of decisions. Instead, we need to live in a black and white thinking world," so we're looking at two perspectives fully, and we're believing in two things at the same time, and that allows us to be able to make better decisions. Now, while I still think that far too many people fall into the trap of thinking black or white, and that's part of the reason of, you know, this polarization—either I'm right or you're right—I think this notion of black and white is intriguing, and it's different in the sense of gray because gray is saying it's not that complicated, whereas black and white, or doublethink, is really being able to step into the other person's shoes. And it's almost like whenever I'm arguing with another person, I've got my what we call a strongman argument—that's my point of view, what I believe to be true; they've got their argument as well, and their strongman argument is their strongest argument. So my strongest argument and their strongest argument, I need to understand both. And the more I can understand both, the more effectively I can have a conversation with that person. More often than not, when we argue with someone else, we have our strongman, we know our strong argument, but we have the other person's what we call strawman argument, and that's their weakest argument, and the reason we have that is because it's easy to argue against, and we like the idea that we're right and they're wrong.
When we talk about doublethink, or this black and white form of thinking, this can be helpful in a number of different ways. For example, you could be both trying to get two different types of customers at the same time, right? So your business could be targeting one type of customer who has a very sort of low budget and another type of customer who is a very high budget, right? So they've lots of money to spend; they're very high-value, high-net-worth individual. And whenever you're deciding on your marketing strategy, you might think to yourself, "Which one do we go after?" Or you might think to yourself, "How do we go after both? And how do we create products for both? How do we do both the high-net-worth and how do we also do the individual that is on a tight budget?" Another really great example of doublethink in action, or this notion of black and white thinking, would be how we handle stress. A lot of the work based upon the work of Ali Crum—Professor Ali Crum has done a lot of work in terms of mindset and its impact on stress—and it was popularized in the book by Professor Kelly McGonigal, which was called *The Upside of Stress*. In a nutshell, the notion is is that stress is bad for us, except if you believe that stress is good for you, then you mitigate the damage. And so that really requires you to believe, on the one hand, stress is bad for us, but on the other hand, if you believe stress is good for you, then it can actually be beneficial in certain ways. And having those two completely polar opposite perspectives, but holding both of them at the same time, it requires a little bit of mental gymnastics, but once you do, it's exceptionally helpful. And I think as well, a lot of times the cultures over in sort of the eastern part of the world—a lot of Asian cultures—tend to find it easier to be able to hold paradoxical concepts at the same time than in the sort of Aristotelian logic-based mentality that we have over on the west. And that's just a sort of an idea and theory, but I remember listening to Robert Anton Wilson, who's a phenomenal author of a number of books like *Quantum Psychology* and *Prometheus Rising*, and he would say certain things that were similar to that—the notion that the way in which we grow up, the way in which we perceive the world, will dictate how easy it is for us to be able to hold two ideas true at the same time. But doublethink is another really, really great mental model.
The next one is what is known as the signal versus the noise. Now, this is popularized in a book called *Signal versus Noise* by Nate Silver, who came to prominence because he was able to successfully predict a couple of the American elections. But this idea of signal versus noise, I think, is so useful, especially in the world today. And the idea is this: the world is full of noise, and that is lots of people are saying a lot of things. If you're going into the consulting industry, lots of noise; if you look at social media, lots of noise; you go into LinkedIn, lots of noise. And noise is pretty much a lot of people talking but not saying very much. And the signal is like the needle in the haystack. The signal is really useful bits of information. So if you read a book and you see that the book is the person's bullshitting for quite a long period of time in the book—they're talking a lot, they're talking a lot, they're talking a lot—the nuggets that you get out of it, the little insights, the little sentences or phrases or techniques or ideas that you get out of that book, they're the signals of that book, which immediately are something that you can immediately take away and use. So in every situation, whenever we're trying to be better at learning, trying to be better at zeroing in on and targeting in on the specific ideas that we want to target in on—no, taking stock of this notion signal versus noise means that we pay attention to the signal, and we're looking for the signal inside of noise. So we're not expecting that when people are communicating it's all going to be signal; we're expecting it's going to be noise, but inside of the noise we're looking for the signal. So, in other words, you're always asking yourself the question, "What is useful in this? What are the ideas I can take from this?" And when you approach things with that mentality, it's a game-changer; it allows you to learn so much faster as a result, because once again, you're dealing with reality as it tends to be.
The next mental model is rational optimism. And this is the notion of—and there's a great book by Matt Ridley, I think, called *The Rational Optimist*—and rational optimism is this idea that we are able to look at the world from an optimistic lens, but we're doing so by looking at the data. And there's research that shows that in books like Steven Pinker's book—he does a deep dive and shows how the world is actually a lot better than it was many years ago—and the world is continuously getting better. And it doesn't feel like that, 'cause if you turn on the news and and you look around and you check in the media, it looks like the world is coming apart at the molecule, and it really looks awful, whereas what Pinker's book really does—and there's another guy called Hans Rosling, who—he's a TED Talk—I think he passed away, but again, he's written another wonderful book—the facts suggest that things are getting better, that the world is getting safer, that the world is getting healthier, that there's an awful lot of good things that are happening, and yet we feel the opposite in many ways. And rational optimism is being optimistic about where we are, being optimistic about where we're going, but basing that optimism in the rationalization and the data and the statistics that suggest that things are getting better and can continue to get better. And Matt Ridley, in his book *The Rational Optimist*, tends to suggest that is something that also is true. So it's not just being optimistic—the notion sometimes that pessimism is realism—well, actually, optimism can also be realism, because it's just a decision to look at things differently and to be rational about it. It means you're looking for evidence to prove that you are in fact true.
Speaking of optimists, the next mental model comes from an optimist called Elon Musk. And this is something that Elon Musk talked about a number of different times, called first principles thinking. First principles thinking is this notion of taking any problem and working it back to the very first principle. So taking apart things. And a great example is whenever he thought about the notion of electric cars and how to make sure that he's leveraging the power of electric vehicles is that the big problem that they had was the cost of producing batteries for electric cars. And so what he would do is he would bring it down to, "Well, what are the raw materials needed in order to build the particular batteries?" And just by breaking it down to what he called the very first principles—"Okay, in order to get to the very first things, in order to challenge all our assumptions and to go back to the very, very beginning, what are the immediate things that we need to do? What are the particular raw materials that we need in order to do this, right?" And it was, "We need this, we need this, we need this. Can we get this cheaper? Yes, we can. Okay, great." Then it was about, "How could—what if we were to create the batteries ourselves as opposed to relying on other people?" Then it was, "What if we were to create the stations?" And so the first principles thinking approach allowed him to be able to work on these problems from the ground up. Now, from our perspective, if we talk about, let's say, the field of psychology, a lot of times we can start to ask ourselves the question, whenever we talk about, "Well, how can I be happy?" Well, we have to work into it. A lot of the work that I do is bringing down to the brass tacks of, "Well, what are the first principles of being happy? What are the first principles of being confident?" And really a large part of it is walking through what of the fundamental most important ingredients that will lead us to being that way. If you take NLP, for example—neurolinguistic programming, co-created by Dr. Richard Bandler and John Grinder—one of the things that NLP does is it looks at what we call submodalities, and submodalities are the qualities of the images we make, the way we talk to ourselves, the feelings we get. So whenever you make an image in your mind, submodalities will look at, "Well, how big is the image? Where do you locate it? How close or far away from you is it? When you talk to yourself, what's the tone of voice?" Those kind of things. And in many ways, that comes from really the first principles of thinking. So, "What is thinking actually made up of?" As you can see, the more we can start to ask that question—"What are the very first principles? What is this actually made up of? Challenging the assumption"—so we can go down to the lowest or the first common denominator rather, what that allows us to be able to identify is what are new ways that we can do this. So it allows us to be able to think differently from the get-go. So it's a wonderful mental model that helps us to be able to solve problems more effectively as well.
The next particular mental model is what I call the law of causes and effect. And this is something that I think I might have mentioned on a previous podcast, but it's such an important mental model that has really helped me so often in the world of psychology, in the world of politics, in the world of economics. We almost always go down the, "What caused that?"
If I say to you, what caused World War I, any of you history buffs might turn around and say, "Well, what caused World War I was..." and then you'll talk about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, who got killed and that kicked off everything. But there were a lot of other factors that led to the precipice whereby World War I began. And the problem is, is that as soon as we bring everything down to one particular cause, that means that we figure, well, if we take away that cause and make sure that cause doesn't happen again, we're good. But the reality is, almost everything is created by a multitude of different causes. And so, for every effect that exists in the world, there's a lot of causes.
How this is useful is that whenever we turn around and think about ourselves and go, "I am this way because of..." often times we'll say one phrase: we'll say, "because of my genetics," "because of my parents," "because of my experiences in school," "because of this," "because of that." And the problem with that is, is that we fall into this trap whereby we immediately think that the reality is created by this singular cause. This sort of singular notion means that we fall into this idea that we reinforce for ourselves that this one thing causes that. And the truth of the matter is, is that's rarely the case. Most of the time, there's a number of different smaller causes; things that seem so insignificant, but yet when they're stacked upon each other and when they're connected, all of a sudden it makes a real difference.
Now, we like to bring things down to a singular cause because it's easy for our brain to understand, and it makes us have the illusion that we understand the way reality works. But when you can realize and understand that actually it's a number of different things that are happening, it can be really helpful. Because then we can start to look for what are the causes of the problem that I'm facing right now. And if we look at the causes, we can start to tackle each one of those causes individually. And by doing so, it allows us to be able to be much more likely to be able to solve that problem and handle it more effectively.
So the next one is from Naval Ravikant, and this is the notion of Leverage. Leverage is this idea that you can take something and you can leverage the same amount of work, with the same amount of effort, and you can leverage it to make it a lot more valuable to you. For instance, the two things that Naval talks about that are particularly easy to leverage is coding and content creation. Coding, for example, is a skill set that if you can learn to code really, really well, that will allow you to be a lot more useful and to make a lot more money in the world that we live in today. Content creation is the same: you could spend an hour creating a video, and as a result of that, that video, whether it's shown to one person or a million people, there's no extra work for you, but you can leverage it a lot more because it can be seen by a lot more people. So you can invest one hour, and the product of that particular hour can be a massive amount. So the notion here is, how can you begin to start to think about high-leverage activities? In other words, one of the things that you can do, that by you doing it, it can be a lot more valuable than just the time that you put in it.
One great example that I heard—I think it was George Mack talking about—was the idea of your personal brand as a particular something to leverage. And so, if you build up a really great brand, that personal brand that you've spent a few years well working on, that can actually carry you through a number of years as well. It can open you up to a lot more opportunity; it can raise the amount of money that you're earning by having a strong personal brand and having a big fan base that can actually make you a lot of money on a regular basis. So you can leverage your brand in such a way that it's a lot more valuable. So the key is, is what are the kinds of things you can do to make the time that you spend even more valuable? What are the things you can do and spend your time on in the moment today that can help you tomorrow, the next day, and many, many weeks and months and even years after that? This idea of Leverage is a really great way of figuring out one of the most important things for us to occupy our time with, because they're the things that we can leverage to be able to get even more out of the time that we spend.
The next particular mental model is what we call antifragility, and this is popularized obviously by the great work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his wonderful book, *Antifragile*. Taleb is a great thinker and an excellent writer, and in this book, the notion of antifragile, or something that is antifragile, is about something that can gain from disorder; something that can gain from chaos. So if fragile is you take a glass and you throw it against the wall and it smashes—it's fragile—antifragile would be, for example, like your muscles. When you lift weights, you break down muscle fibers, and those muscle fibers grow back bigger, right? And so, when you expose your muscles to adversity in that way, your muscles respond; when you break them down, to grow back bigger. That's because they're what we call antifragile. Now, this is also related to the notion of post-traumatic growth: that whenever certain people experience trauma, they tend to become stronger and better as a result of that. And so the notion here is, is that if you can start to see that as a useful way of thinking, this mental model will allow you to look at adversity you face, or change that you face, or even traumatic situations that you face, and find a way and ask the question, "How can this make me stronger? How can this make me better?"
The next mental model is what we talk about as zero-based thinking. Zero-based thinking is the idea—and I think Brian Tracy described an exercise similar to this—but this notion is something along the lines of, "If you were to start from scratch, what would you do?" So if you were trying to lose weight, let's say you're in the middle of some sort of diet or you're exercising a certain way, you want to lose weight, you stop and you go, "If I was not doing anything, what would I start with?" Or if you've got a business and you're running a business, and you stop and you go, "If I was to start this business from scratch, what would I do?" And it's like the beginner's mind. I think a lot of times in yoga, people mention the term "the beginner's mind," and I think it's a really useful way... this zero-based thinking: it's like, "I'm starting at zero, what are the first few things that I need to do?" And thinking that way allows you to see things that perhaps you might not see right now. It also avoids something else that we'll talk about called the sunk cost bias, and the sunk cost bias is the notion that because we've been doing something for quite a while, we're less likely to give it up because we've put all of this effort in and we don't want it to be for nothing. But actually, sometimes the right thing to do is let it go. What are the new things that I would do if I was starting from scratch? So it's a very, very helpful thing.
Number 11, mental model 11—we're already almost halfway there—forcing functions. Also, I would put in what is known as the Ulysses contract. I think I learned the Ulysses contract from Annie Duke; I was certainly someone in the area of behavioral economics. But forcing functions is something I heard George—George Mack—talk to Chris—Chris Williamson—about. And forcing functions is putting yourself in a situation where you're forced to do something. So, for example, you take a percentage of your income that always goes into a tax account at the end of each month. You're setting that up so that you don't have to make the decision. So you organize your finances by creating all of these direct debits, and as a result of that, you don't have to touch it, and that avoids any sort of requirement of remembering it or requirement of willpower from your perspective. It's a very, very helpful strategy that can help you to make decisions by not making decisions, by setting up your life that way.
And why I put in the Ulysses contract—this is named after the, obviously, the ancient Greek figure Ulysses, who was mentioned in Homer's Odyssey. So Ulysses was this great figure, and he was the king of Ithaca, and he was on his way home from, I think maybe a war or something, and he was basically in a ship with a with a bunch of other sailors. He was the king of the ship, the captain of the ship, and he was going to be sailing by these dangerous cliffs. And on the dangerous cliffs there were these sirens, and these were sort of like mythical creatures that were like incredible song singers, right? So you're talking about the greatest singers ever, and they're like singing at... and you're... and you're on the boat. And what happened is, is that every single time a ship would be going by the sirens, the sirens would sing so beautifully that the people on the ship would be like, "Oh, we gotta get in!" It's like trying to get into a concert, right? You're like, "Oh, we gotta go in!" And so they would turn the ship towards the rocks, and the ships would break apart, and they'd all die, right? So the sirens, these sirens sound like psychopaths. I mean, they were... how many sailors died as a result of them? Were like, "I'm going to sing a song, and the song I'm going to sing is going to bring you in, and you're going to die, smashed against..." I mean, these sirens were the ultimate serial killers, right? I don't know why they weren't arrested; that wasn't in Homer's Odyssey. But what was... I think was Ulysses was about to go past the... I mean, personally, I'd be like, "Well, just go far away! Like, go see you can't hear the music!" But Ulysses was even worse because he said, "Look, I want to drive past, and not only do I want to drive past, drive past, I want to sail past! I want to sail past in such a way that I can hear the music." Now, I know what you're saying; you're saying to yourself, "Typical stubborn man!" He thinks to himself, "Oh, it won't affect me." But he was smart; he knew it would affect him, but he still wanted to hear it. He wanted to, you know, he wanted his cake and he wanted to eat it. So what he did was he said, "Okay, here's the deal: I want all of my sailors to put beeswax in their ears." Right? Beeswax is, you know what beeswax is; it's like, comes from bees, and it's like wax, right? And that apparently it wasn't dangerous to put in your ears. And he said, "I want you all to put this in your ears so you can hear the music," right? Kind of greedy that he was the only one able to hear the music. But then he said, "I want you to strap me to the mast, and you have to tie me to the mast, and you're not allowed to let me go." So they did that, they... and he said, "No matter what I say, do not let me go." So they sailed on past, and my guess is—I wasn't there; it's quite a while ago—and I also think it's a myth—but uh, he was going past the sirens were singing; they're like, "Come on! We're going to murder you! You're the fifth target this week; we want you to die!" And Ulysses was like, "Yes, everyone! I want you to turn the ship! Turn the ship! Turn the ship!" They didn't hear him; they were like, "Do you hear something? No..." I mean, they wouldn't say that because they had beeswax, so they wouldn't be able to talk to each other, right? Which is kind of... kind of hard. But apparently he was shouting down, and they... that's the... there's the weak plot point there. He turns to them and says, "Hey, no matter what I say, do not under any circumstances let me go." How would they know what he's saying if they had beeswax? I got a canner for you, okay, Homer... um, let's hear you explain that one away. Anyway, point is, when the ship passed, sorted out, he got to hear the beautiful music afterwards. I'm sure he was let down. He goes, "I mean, if he managed to get their attention, that is... cuz they still got the beeswax," but he's going, "Oh my goodness! That was amazing! That was such good music! But thanks for not letting me go; we would have died otherwise." So that was a really long way of describing the Ulysses contract, and I haven't even explained what it is. So the Ulysses contract is very simply organizing your habits such that you force yourself—you put yourself in a position like Ulysses did—where you've got no other choice to do it, right? So you're kind of forced into that context. So if you go to, for example, the grocery store and you only buy healthy food, then whenever you're snacking, you're only going to eat healthy food. That was probably one of the longest-winded descriptions of that, but hopefully you made it through it, and if you did, good for you! Well done! That was almost as treacherous as it would have been if you had to listen to the sirens.
Number 12 is the law of motivational beliefs, and this is a really cool one. This is simply this notion, and it's based upon one of the elements of what I call the scaled framework of belief leadership: it's the deed, the drive, or desire. It's the fact that a lot of times we believe what we want to believe, and this is really helpful and really useful because when you realize that more often than not people are believing what they want to believe, it means that in order for you to be able to change a person's mind, you have to figure out how can you make them feel like believing in your new idea? How can you help them to see why believing what you have to say will actually benefit them? And this means not just thinking about how can I prove someone wrong, but how can I entice them? How can I seduce them? How can I build a desire for them to believe in whatever useful ideas that you think will be beneficial for them in the long run? So when we think about even our own beliefs, and we think about, "Well, what do I believe?" you can also ask yourself, "Am I believing this because I want to believe it? And is there something else that also would be helpful to me that would be more useful to me or more empowering to me?" For instance, if you believe that you'll never succeed, and therefore that serves you—you want to believe that because it means you don't have to try and you don't have to risk failure. Understanding that about yourself—that you're not believing it because it's true, you're believing in it because it protects you or because you feel safe as a result—that gives you permission to be able to not try. But if you recognize that's what you're doing—you're only believing it because you want to—that can then open you up and go, "Well, what if I was to believe something else? What if I was to change the way I feel about getting rejected or not succeeding? What if I was to see that differently? And what if that was something good for me and could empower me?" Then that just might allow you to transform and allow you to improve. So the law of motivational beliefs is the notion that people believe what they want to believe.
The next particular mental model comes from the area of marketing, where it's what we call Blue Ocean Thinking. And this is coming from a book written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. And apologies if I've mispronounced any either of those names; I always struggle with those two names for some reason. But the notion of the Blue Ocean strategy is that Blue Ocean really looks at uncontested market space. So we've got the red ocean of marketing where everyone's like fighting over the same kinds of things; they're trying to be cheaper, they're trying to be higher quality sometimes, but they're all fighting over the same kind of thing. The Blue Ocean strategy is really a strategy in marketing where they're looking for uncontested market space; they're looking for, "What can we compete in that no one else is competing in?" And the very simple example they use, which was sort of a very popular example, is the notion of Cirque du Soleil. Cirque du Soleil actually was in a space of its own, a totally new thing, but it was the combination of circuses, which are usually targeted to a very low budget, to musicals, which are much higher budget, right? And they're kind of two different animals. Bring the two together; bring musicals together with circus acts, and you've got something else that could be high budget but very, very different to anything seen before. And so when Cirque du Soleil came out, it became so popular because it was again in a blue ocean of possibilities and opportunities. So how can you think differently? How can you look at a situation and ask yourself, "What is a new way that we can do things? How can we disrupt the industry? How can we compete in a new way?" If something is always about what's the cheapest, how can we figure out a way to make it the most expensive? If something is always based upon convenience, how can we make it so it's like luxury, right? What are the things we can do that people aren't expecting? And again, another example might be: for a lot of times in the past, a haircut was really about, "Let me get my hair cut as quickly as possible." So you go in there, they cut it, they talk to you maybe, and then you're out. Whereas some barbers now that you know... you go in there, they let you play the PlayStation, apparently they'll, you know, give you a glass of whiskey, you'll be able to watch a movie... and I mean, there's all sorts of stuff. Although that's a bit annoying because if a... if you're watching a movie and you get to see the whole movie, that's a 90-minute hair... I mean, you want to have serious hair for that; you want to have a lot of hair if it takes them 90 minutes. And if it only takes them 30 minutes and you're like in the middle of a movie, what are you supposed to do then, right? Imagine it's one of those like exciting movies; you're like, "What happens next?" You got to... I suppose you only have to rent it out, but let's imagine it's one of those movies that's on a different channel. There's all these permutations that I don't want to get lost in, but I think it's important to think through. Point is, the Blue Ocean strategy is about creating this uncontested market space, and it's helpful for us to be able to look at, "What if we turn this on a tad? What if we look at this from a completely different perspective? What... what might we see?"
The next mental model, reflexivity, is number 14. And reflexivity is when actions influence the environment, which in turn influences one's actions. George Soros mentioned this from an economic perspective, and in many ways this notion of reflexivity is something that can occur quite a lot, even in terms of your own emotional state. Can dictate the decisions that you make, and those decisions that you make can affect the environment, which in turn can affect your decisions. So sometimes things happen reflexively whereby what we think... think about as being just something that we do is influenced by the environment, but we also influence the environment by our response to that environment. Then there's a sort of a two-way connection between... between what we do or what we say and what the environment says back to us in terms of what happens as a result of this. So that's the notion of reflexivity.
The next idea is what we call inversion, and this is something that Charlie Munger talked about. Inversion is this notion that to get to be, for example, if we're looking at any idea or any goal that we have, one of the ways we can do it is to invert it. It comes from sort of maths, and to invert, and to look at the opposite to that. So if you want to figure out how to be happy, then you figure out, first of all, well, what leads you to sadness? Or what leads most people to sadness? And I remember Shane Parrish, in his book *Mental Models*, talks through this notion of inversion but gives a number of examples of whenever you take something of, "This is what I want to achieve," well, what is the opposite to that? So you want to be more confident, for example; what is the opposite of that? That's being nervous. So what are the kinds of things that you would do if you were making yourself nervous? And then what is the opposite of those actions? And so, by looking at something the opposite way—a little bit like the reflexivity, I suppose—but by looking at something in the opposite way, it allows you to look at things in a very, very different way than you might have before. And a lot of times when we talk about traditional goal setting, we just think about, "Right, what goal do I want to achieve?" When you talk about it from an inversion perspective, you're looking at, "Right, what's the opposite to that? What do I really not want? And one of the things that I would do if I was getting what I don't want, and then what is the opposite to those actions?" So it's a very different way of thinking, but so often we can struggle with knowing what we want; we can struggle with knowing what we should do. And when we invert it, it actually opens us up to a new way of thinking, which is why this is one of the most popular and one of the coolest mental models.
The next mental model is something that I call agency math, and this is something that... it's a concept I haven't come up with, but the notion, agency math... the reason I describe it is because it's really about calculating what's under your control fully in any situation; what is something you can influence but you can't fully control; and then what's something outside of your control. And when you stop and you think, "What's fully controllable by me? What can I influence? And what is outside of my control or influence?" that allows you to deal with almost any adversity, any stress, any problem in a much more powerful way. One of the most important things we need to do in a very stressful and very overwhelming world is to get better at focusing on what we can do, what we can focus on in terms of what we can control, in terms of what we can influence. The more we spend time thinking about what we can control and influence, the more easy it'll be for us to be able to handle the world. And the problem is, so much of our stress comes from something outside of our locus of control, and as a result of that, it makes us feel pretty... pretty poor. So it's critical that we do is we get better at what... what I call this agency math.
Number 17—forgetting through them 17—is Occam's Razor, and this is named after William of Ockham, a 14th-century English Franciscan friar and philosopher. And this is the notion—and it's the most famous of all the razors that are put out there—but it's the problem-solving principle that suggests that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. In other words, the simplest solution is often the right one; the simplest solution is often the right one. And this is something that's informed different detective stories; it's been around and used by many different people. But what's really helpful about it is that we live in a world that often times it's almost like we're seduced by complexity; we're seduced by something that is complicated. And a lot of the times the simplest and easiest to understand solution is actually what's going on. And because we like the notion of complexity, we like the notion of being challenged, we can miss that. But it's vital that we spend... spend a bit of time looking and asking the question, "What's the simplest and easiest and most likely scenario here?" And when we do, when we identify that, it allows us to be able to see things better, and as a result...
Of that, we're much more likely to solve problems. So, next time we're looking at a problem, ask yourself, "What is the easiest and simplest solution here?" Maybe, just maybe, it's that.
The next particular mental model is what I call—but it's obviously named after him—the Godat formula for happiness. This is based upon Mo Godat. Godat is a wonderful author; he's the author of a number of books, including "Solve for Happy," and he's a former chief engineer of, I think, Google X. To sum it up, it's basically the equation or the formula he gives is that perception minus expectations equals happiness. In other words, what we're ultimately looking for is: how do we expect an event to occur, and then what do we perceive when we experience that event? And if our expectations exceed the perception, we're sad, and if our perception exceeds our expectations, we're happy. And so the notion is, you can control what your expectations are, and to a degree, you can control your perception because you can control where you put your attention.
Now, while this is not necessarily an entire formula for happiness, because that tends to be more based upon the notion of dopamine, right, and dopamine is the motivation molecule to do with the anticipation of reward. And so, when you do expect something to go well and it doesn't go well, that tends to be low levels of dopamine in your brain. Whenever you expect it to go well, but it goes even better, that's high levels of dopamine in the brain. So, in a nutshell, when we're looking at this formula, it tends to be good for the dopaminergic interpretation of happiness, but that's not the only form of happiness, right? But as a simple principle, it's pretty cool. So, again, one simple thing you can do to become happier is to be mindful of what are the expectations I have, because like the contrast principle says, you'll be often contrasting what are the expectations I have and what is the experience like. And by being able to look at the difference between your experiences versus your expectations, if you can make it so that your experiences are higher than your expectations, that can ensure that you are building and cultivating a better sense of happiness. And there's a number of other authors that talk about something very, very similar, but I do like how simple this formula is from Godat.
Number 19 is the law of reversed effort, or the law of reversed effect, sometimes known as—and this is that with certain things, the harder you try to do something, the harder it is. So you try to get to sleep; the more you try, "I'm going to sleep, I'm going to sleep," I mean, hopefully you're not making those faces in bed. If you're like this, "I hope I sleep," when you're trying to sleep, definitely not going to work out, you know, because you're tensing; you look—look at that facial expression—no one sleeps like this. You ever seen anyone sleep like that? They've got issues, right? You want to be able to chill, right? And uh, even if that's what you're doing inside your head, it's not going to go well for you. When you try not to stutter, if you stutter a lot and you try not to stutter, often times it's harder. If you try not to twitch, often times you twitch. If you try not to blush, often times you'll blush more. Whenever people have panic attacks, the more they try to calm down, the more panicked they are. That's why when you tell a person, "Um, calm down, don't be stressed, chill out," doesn't go well. Whenever you say that, doesn't go well; people don't like you. So I have an experiment for you: Let's say you're significant other, or some friend of yours, and they are, you know, getting stressed out, just tell them, "Look, calm down, chill," and notice the response. And uh, if they calm down, you've got magic powers. More often than not, you tell someone to calm down or chill when they're stressed out, they're going to punch you in the face; they're going to lose it. So that's called a law of reversed effort. And what is the usefulness of the law of RSE? Well, it's easy to see when you're in those situations, instead of trying, come to terms with and accept the fact that you might not get to sleep, that you might blush, that one of these things might happen, and then you're not going to be moving against yourself, and you're much more likely to actually be okay as a result. So really, really useful approach there.
The next one is optimizing for, or what is known as, or what I think it was George M. calls, meaningful metrics. And this is the notion that we tend to make mistakes in life because we tend to use metrics to measure success which are not the right metrics. So, for example, you look at your Instagram and you go, "How many followers do I have? How many likes do I have?" And that determines your happiness. And this idea that the amount of followers or the amount of likes that you have, there're what are known as the wrong kind of metrics to measure success. Because if you're always measuring your success based upon these external forms of validation, that it means that you're constantly hoping that the world is going to turn around and give you exactly what you think you want or you think you deserve, and that's not the way the world works. So just because people get—I mean, you go on LinkedIn, right, and you see someone writes something like innocuous, like, "Business can be hard sometimes," or like, "You know, when you're in business, it's important to be professional," like something basic, and if they've got a lot of fans, you—you've got like thousands of comments and thousands of likes going, "You're so—it's so true, you need to be professional when you're in business. Oh, it's a brilliant point. Yes, sometimes bad things do happen. Oh, that's genius. Yes, you need to communicate with people with your eyes open. That was so clever," like all of this stuff. And you're looking at it and—I'm talking about signal versus noise—you're looking at it and go, "This is all noise; this is noisy," and it's so frustrating when you see it, and then there's thousands of likes and thousands of comments. And if we then start to look at it and go, "The amount of comments or likes you have is indicative of how great your ideas are," well, that's just flat out wrong; it's crazy, but yet we fall for it. And so it's really important for us to be able to look at that and go, "The reason there's a lot of comments and likes is not indicative of the fact that that's a great idea; it's indicative of the fact that people like that idea, people agree with it, people already know it, and reinforces what they think." Great, wonderful, super. But we need to recognize that if we are to be able to do what we need to do, if we are able to get the kind of results that we want to get, if we are to be able to make it so that we are making better decisions about how to live our life, we need to stop using metrics that are—learn what we call meaningful, or what are known as meaningful. And this really means optimizing for whatever it is that will help you to succeed. So whenever you decide, "What am I optimizing for?" that means, "What am I focusing on?" So are you optimizing for health? Are you optimizing for energy? Are you optimizing—and optimizing for health, like—for example, I've got this Oura ring, right, and it measures your sleep and all that sort of stuff, and it says, "What's your goal?" And based upon the goal, it will tell me the metrics I'm looking for. So is my goal recovery? Is my goal energy? Is my goal being able to sleep better? And so whatever I'm optimizing for is what dictates what it's focusing my attention on. Whenever you're eating—again, I do intermittent fasting—when I do that, I do that for stomach reasons, so I'm optimizing because I've stomach issues; I'm optimizing to make my stomach feel better. If I go on a different diet, I'll be optimizing perhaps to lose weight. If I decide to put on muscle, I'm optimizing for muscle. Whatever you optimize for, whatever metrics you decide to live your life to, will determine the results you get. So the question is—and this is where it's so useful—"What is it that you need to start optimizing for? What are the metrics you need to start chasing?" And when you find those metrics and find what to optimize for, that will dictate then how you move forward with your life, what actions you take, and how you start to build the kind of life that you want. Really, really good stuff.
The next one is what I'm referring to as grit versus quit. Do you like the way the rhyme, "grit versus quick," kind of clever, if you ask me? I'm not the first person to say that; I'm pretty sure. When do you grit? When do you quit? I've heard people say that; can't remember who, but I do know that there's a book called "Grit," written by Angela Duckworth, a well-known psychologist, and there's the book "Quit," written by Annie Duke. And the general idea of "Grit" by Angela Duckworth is that suggests that when people use passion and perseverance, that allows them to keep getting stuck in through the messy middle and accomplish their goals. And the purpose or the main idea of "Quit" by Annie Duke is this notion that you have to know when to quit; you have to know when to walk away. And so this dichotomy is really about being able to get to the point where you're always looking at a situation and you're asking yourself the question, "Do I grit? Do I quit?" And certain times you need to be able to walk away, and that means if this isn't serving your bigger purpose, if this isn't leading you towards where you want to get to, if this isn't helping you accomplish your ultimate aims, then that's the time to walk away. So always be looking at the lens of any big project you're doing, "Do I grit or do I quit?" When it gets tough, it's important for you to walk away for the right reasons, or it's important for you to push through for the right reasons, but you need to be able to know that that's the ultimate choice.
Number 22 is what is known as the narcissism razor. And this is remembering that people are too busy worrying about their own thoughts rather than thinking of you. This is uh, trap we often fall into as we go through life, and we're looking at, "Oh my goodness, I look so ridiculous, and what do they think about me?" And what do they—most of the time, people aren't thinking about you; they don't care; they're thinking about themselves; they're obsessing; they're probably spending their time thinking about themselves and what everyone else is thinking of them. And so once you realize this, it actually makes life a lot easier, because if people were thinking about us the amount of times that we think that they're thinking about us, it would be a nightmare for—not just for you, but for them as well, because they'd be constantly thinking about us. And it's really vital that we don't fall into that trap, because the more that we obsess with thinking that everyone is thinking about us, the more we're like extra careful with action we take, and we're worried about this and we're worried about that, and really most people at the end of the day do not care.
Number 23 is friction reduction. This notion of friction is something that is—it's been popularized in the work of behavioral economics, the notion of "Nudge," which is a great book, written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. And the idea is is that you—when you create an environment that's conducive for you to be able to get certain actions—and we'll talk more about another mental model related to this next time—but whenever you create an easier environment for you to be able to succeed in, that makes it easier for you to take a new action. So it's—it's known as nudging people, but also the idea is you make it as easy as possible. And James Clear's book, "Atomic Habits," one of the things he says, "Make it easy; make it fun." Well, that notion of making it easy is reducing friction. So how can you make a new behavior that you want to engage in as easy as possible? So how can you reduce the friction? Like, what is the friction that is between you and this new behavior? How can you reduce that friction? And then how can you increase friction to an old behavior you no longer want to engage in? So simple example is: if there's a food you want to stop eating, how can you make it a lot harder to eat the food? You don't buy it in the store, right? Or if you do buy it because someone else in the—in the house wants it, then you make it hard to get for you; you create as much friction as possible. And then the flip side is is that something you want to eat more of—blueberries, apples, whatever it is—you make them very easy to get; you make it simple for you to just grab an apple off the counter, just—just like this—just like this. "An apple a day, an apple a day keeps the doctor away," an apple a day—uh, sorry, I don't know what I was doing there. But the key is: the easier it is, the more likely you were to do it; the harder it is, the less likely you were to do it. So friction reduction is really about reducing the friction of the new behavior, but then you could add friction to make another behavior you don't want harder to do, and it makes it less likely to do it.
Number 24, or is what I call emotional blindness triggers. And this is something I see all the time at the moment. Emotional blindness triggers is when people that are ordinarily pretty smart—or it really happens to everyone; it happens to—to—to people who are dummies as well—but super smart people, really rational, really balanced, really this, really that, they get triggered, and they get triggered emotionally, and they're just completely blind; they've got no reason left, right? This is how people think about lots of the—the conflicts in the world, right? You've got Israel, Palestine; you've got Ukraine; you've got Donald Trump; you've got Joe Biden; you've got Republicans versus uh, Democrats; I mean, you name it, right? You've got COVID masks; you've got vaccines, right? All of these are triggered, right? I guarantee you—I say these—you even got abortion, right, pro-choice, pro-life, just thrown out there. All of these triggers—the challenge is not just the fact that people have different points of view, it's that as soon as they experience someone on the other side—because there's generally two sides—they become so emotionally triggered that they no longer see sense. And I'm like this as well. If—if you talk about Ireland and Ireland as a country and freedom from Britain and all that, I'm quite biased there, to be fair, and it's because, once again, I have strong emotions attached. So if you uh, say to me, "Oh, Owen, you're from Britain," I lose it, and—and I'm never angry with the person, but I lose it. I'm like, "No, no, no, I'm from Ireland," like I—it's for some unknown reason, it's a huge deal to me. And uh, for me, I—I don't care what the context is or how uncomfortable or how awkward it is; you will know by the end of that conversation that I'm Irish. And I know that it's not rational per se, but I feel very strongly. That's an example of emotional blindness, because I can't think rationally, or I can, but I don't want to in that situation because it's so important to me. And so often in a lot of these challenges that are happening in the world, we fall into that trap, and we just cannot see the other person's side. That's emotional blindness triggers. And I bring it up now just to say to be aware of it is really, really critical, because I think a lot of times what a lot of these people do—and once again, we—we'll talk about another one next time—but what a lot of these people do that are super smart, super rational, is that when they get triggered, they don't accept that they're emotionally blinded to it. Like, if there's anything that I have that's an advantage over a lot of the people I've heard is the fact that I'm opening up about the fact that I—I got no ability to see reason here, right, when it comes to my country. However, a lot of people don't do that; what they do is they lose it, but they go, "Well, this is the truth; these are the facts, and you can't dismiss," because everyone chooses their own facts, right? Everyone chooses their own support. So it's important for us to, I think, be aware of it, recognize it, and understand that none of us are free from this; we are all affected by this equally.
And just so that we don't finish on that quite a volatile example, let's finish with number 25, for the notion of compounding. Now, compounding is something that anyone who's read a finance book will know about—compound interest. So what you do is you start off with a dollar, you double it, then you double it, then you double it every single day, and see where you get up to. Do it, yeah? Maybe type it into the comments if you're on YouTube. Type in whatever you get—30 days, you double it every day; you start off with a dollar on day one. Let me know what it comes to, right? I don't know; could be like tens of thousands, could be hundreds of thousands, could be millions. Too lazy to do the math, but you can do it. Come on! If you've got any time, but do it after the podcast episode, at least let me finish. But this notion of compound is something that James Clear, in his book "Atomic Habits," talks about—compound actions or compound behaviors. The notion is that small gains can accumulate into significant gains over time. And when you do a few things consistently, they actually add up; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right? That's the notion. And so it really does speak to whatever habits that you're building—build consistently; make small, tiny progress in the habits, and they will build up to something more incredible. When you're investing money, again, small but yet consistent will lead you to compound gains over time. And sometimes we try to do a huge whack of a change; it doesn't work that well. But when you can make small changes, bit by bit, it actually adds up to a lot more over the long term, which is the power of compounding.
There we have it; we have done a lot in this episode. We've gone through 25 different mental models, and I'm hoping that you're thinking to yourself, "OMG, that was so much information! I got to go back and rewatch this," because the more that you watch this again and again, the more views I get on YouTube, or I got to listen to it again, the more episodes that are heard on Apple podcasts or Spotify or whatever—wherever you hear your podcast. So please do feel free to listen, listen again, share it; let people know. A lot of wisdom, a lot of ideas in this episode. But for now, we will get back again in a future episode; we'll do part two; we'll do another 25 mental models. And I really feel that if you can just apply some of these ideas in your life, they are going to transform things. For now, please do share, subscribe on YouTube by hitting the Subscribe button—don't know where it's going to pop up, but it's going to pop up somewhere—but subscribe on YouTube, let people know, spread the word. And for now, take care, be well. May the force, as always, be with you; may you continue to believe better, and may you use these mental models to make your life even better and even lovelier. Bye for now.