Mastering Mental Models

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 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 a recent book called clear thinking an excellent book he also co-wrote a book called called mental models and there was three volumes of them and this is something that he became well known for he's a website called faram Street and faram street is named after I think it was a

house that Warren Buffett lived on or certainly it was where birkshire Hathaway Warren Buffett's company that he shares with shared with Charlie moer 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 uh many years ago well he became fascinated with a lot of the lessons that he was learning from especially Charlie Monger but also Buffett and what he found was is that there was a lot of these as Monger I think described them as mental models these are

sort of uh 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 faram street you can still access the farem 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 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 uh he's well known in the startup and tech industry there's Alex horoi who's well known in the marketing industry and once again there's a few

ideas he's shared there's Annie Juke 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 s out there in the area of decision making and behavioral economics and there's also such figures like Nim Nicholas TB who is the author of books like the Black Swan and anti fragile 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 uh 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 uh 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 Felman Barrett now Lisa Felman Barrett talks about the construct iist 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 effective reality and effective realism is something that she's mentioned a number of times in a couple of the books she's written effective realism is this notion that we see reality through the lens of how we feel in other words the way 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 effect effect that we feel right affect a fe C 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 effective 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 berler 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 effective 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 uh 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 chalini in his book influenced 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 chini'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 75% increase all of a sudden what look 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 # blessed life 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 too some of the research studies have show 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 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 double think now double think 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 double think 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 mindfield 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 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 double think 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 strong man we know our strong argument but we have the other person's what we call straw man 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 double think 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 double think 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 Chrome Professor Ali Chrome 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 mcgonagle H 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 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 artian 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 Anon Wilson who's a phenomenal author of a number of books like Quantum psychology in 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 double think 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 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 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 the signal is like the needle in the Hat sack 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 GameChanger 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 a 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 cuz 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 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 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 tax 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 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 sub modalities 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 so

if I say to you what caused World War I any of you history of fasad might turn around and say well what caused World War I was and then you'll talk about the France Ferdinand who got killed and that kicked off everything but there was 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 and 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 and 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 and 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 nval 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 ER can be a massive amount and 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 anti- frigidity and this is popularized obviously by the great work of nim Nicholas TB in his wonderful book antifragile TB 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 smashes CU 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 that's because they're what we call antifragile now this is also related to the 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 uh 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 zerob based thinking and zerob 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 lot of times in yoga people mention the term The Beginner's mind and I think it's a really useful way this zerob 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 sun cost bias and the sun 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 ulyses contract I think I learned the ulyses contract from Annie Juke I was certainly someone in the area of Behavioral economics but forcing functions is certain something I heard George talked to Chris about George Mark talked to 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 ulyses contract this is named after the obviously the ancient Greek figure ulyses who was mentioned in Homer's Odyssey so ulyses was this great figure

and he was the king of itha 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 with a bunch of other Sailors he was the 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 was these sirens and these these were 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 got to get in it's like trying to get into a concert right you're like oh we got to go in and so they would turn the ship towards the the rocks and the ships would break apart and they'd all die right so the sirens these sirens sound like 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 ulyses 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 the music but ulyses 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 saell past I want to saell past in such a way that I can hear the music now I know what you're saying you 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 ear 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 ulyses 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 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 gu a canr 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 doing it we would have died otherwise so that was a really long way of describing ulyses contract and I haven't even explained what it is so the ulyses contract is very simply organizing your habits such that you force yourself you

put yourself in a position like ulyses 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 as there's 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 serve 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 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 Renee mourn 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 very popular example is the notion of Cirus and Cirus actually was in a space of its own a totally new thing but it was the combination of circuses which are usually

targeted to 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 Cirus 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 expect and again another example might be for a lot of times in the past there was haircut was really about let me get my hair cut as quickly as POS 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 mean there's all sorts of stuff although that's a bit annoying cuz if a if you're watching a movie and you get to see the whole movie that's 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 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 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 and 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 to 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 moer talked about

and 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 mats 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 Parish in 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 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 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 Ma 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 ways 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 some 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 aam's Razor and this is named after

William of aam a 14th century English Franciscan frier and philosopher and this is the notion and it's the most famous of all the the razors that are uh 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 godat formula for happiness and this is based upon MO 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 it's 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 exceeds 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 dope minic and 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 reversed effort or the law 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 as sleep the more you try I'm going to sleep I'm going to sleep I mean hopefully you're not making those jashu 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 sleeps 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 and notice the response and uh if they C 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 reverse effort and what is the usefulness of the law RSE ACC 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 asleep 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 talk 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 and optimizing for health like uh for example I've got this Aura 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 Juke and the general idea of grit by Angela duward 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 any Juke 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 IIT do I grit or 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 WR written by

Richard Taylor and Cass sunstein and the idea is is that you when you create uh 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 the 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 all Behavior you no longer want to engage in so simple example is if there's a 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 Apple 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 apple a day apple a day after me

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 is the less lik 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 got Joe Biden you got Republicans versus uh Democrats I mean you name it

right you 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 uh 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 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 dism 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 clar 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 home 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 consistent

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 metal 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