Mental models from the Farnam Street blog
I just did another deep dive into Farnam Street, the blog Shane Parrish runs. It’s not stale motivation. It gives you “thinking tools” so you don’t keep making the wrong decisions.
The further I go, the more I realize: these days our problem isn’t too little information. It’s too few frameworks for processing it.
A library for thinking well
Shane Parrish is a former Canadian intelligence analyst who started the blog, fs.blog, out of frustration that formal schooling so rarely teaches one crucial thing: how to think well.
Today it has become one of the most solid “libraries” on decision-making on the internet. It’s neatly organized into six main areas:
- Accelerated Learning: how to learn efficiently
- Mental Models: 100+ ways of thinking
- Decision Making: the art of making decisions
- Reading Better: how to read books so they stick
- Intellectual Giants: learning from great figures
- Self Improvement: understanding how your brain works
Different glasses for one problem
Put simply, mental models are like a collection of “glasses” for looking at one problem from different angles.
Take inversion. Instead of racking your brain over how to succeed, flip it around: “What would definitely make me fail?” Then avoid those things. Simple, but it really lands.
There’s a favorite quote from Charlie Munger that felt like a slap in the face: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
I relate to this a lot. Sometimes we’re stuck not because the problem is hard, but because our ego insists on using just one point of view to solve everything.
Where I’d start
If you’re just starting out, these are the three basic models I’d get familiar with first:
- First principles: break a problem down to its roots, instead of just following the trend.
- Second-order thinking: don’t only think about the immediate effect. Think about “the effects of the effects” too.
- Circle of competence: know the limits of your own abilities.
The bottom line: having lots of mental models is like having a complete toolbox. The more tools you have, the sharper your decisions get.
I’m going to go through the mental models that make the biggest difference in real life slowly, one at a time.