Mental Models

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How different your life would be if you were capable of choosing the best solution, regardless of the problem you were presented with?
How different it would be if you had made different decisions along the way completely sure that you were doing the right thing?Every person faces critical decisions every day as they choose what to do with their lives. So, how do you build on these decisions to become wildly successful like people like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos? These men are not geniuses, and while they do have an incredible work ethic, what lies at the heart of their success is the unique way in which they think. Consider this information is useless unless you can apply it. For example, if a person can list all the counties within a state, it can be cool to show off to friends and a good ice breaker in dating situations. However, it isn't necessarily something that is useful in most situations. It is just a list of facts that doesn't have a true purpose.
Knowledge becomes useful when you can apply it to a framework. That is what mental models essentially are a framework for thinking.When making decisions or solving problems, people are limited to the information that they have available to them.
Mental models let information be organized, visualized, and conceptualized. They represent all the possible outcomes in problem-solving and decision making and let you organize them in a way that makes it possible to choose the most desirable outcome.Even though mental models are incredible tools, they can also be limiting. A person who specializes in something, as people often do in their careers, is limited to the mental models they are familiar with. This means that unless they work to broaden their mental models, they might only see a problem a specific way.
For example, before starting Amazon, Jeff Bezos had an idea about an online bookstore. Even though the idea was promising, the Internet was rather new at the time. He also already had a great job, and there was a risk of failure. Instead of doing what many people would when trying to make a big decision like starting a company and thinking about what could go wrong, he decided to frame his decision a different way. Bezos used what is known as the regret minimization framework by visualizing himself looking back at his life from decades in the future. He had this idea, and there was a risk of failure, as there always with great ideas-but would he regret it at 80 years old if he didn't try?
Bezos decided he would-and that was when the idea for Amazon came to fruition. Even if that idea would not have been a great success, Bezos knew he would regret not trying. He was able to reach this conclusion using a mental model that let him see the situation in a different perspective-a perspective that allowed him to create one of the most successful companies in the world today.
This book will serve as a foundation for understanding mental models in a way that will allow you to apply them to work and your life. As you learn new ways to think about things, you have more possible outcomes at your disposal. You'll find yourself capable of making the right decisions, over and over again. You'll also find that it is easier to solve problems with the best possible outcome. Who wouldn't want to reach the same degree of success as someone like Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett? All you have to do is change the way you think. The good news? It's something that you build on slowly over time.
This means that you can get started today by opening up to the first page of this book!