DisambiguationGeneralMental ModelsAvoid PitfallsPersonalGoal Self Awareness PrinciplesSpecific Examples Career Change
Disambiguation
- Mental Model
A simplified explanation of how things work
- Principle
Fundamental truths or law that serves as the basis for a system of belief or behavior. Unbreakable rule and guidelines that our action should be aligned with
- Value
Internal moral code based on the principle we hold to be true. Mental map of how things should be
General
Mental Models
i.e. how to make “smart” decisions (the reasoning of our thought process).
- The Map Is Not the Territory
- Circle of competence
- First Principle
- Inversion
- Second-order thinking
- Margin of safety
- Two-track analysis
- Global and local maxima
- Probabilistic thinking
- Small bets
- Bayesian thinking
- Fat-tailed curves
- Black swan event
- Compounding
- Principle agent problem
- Activation Energy
- Cognitive biases
- Survivorship bias
- Confirmation bias
- Availability heuristic
- Attribution error
Avoid Pitfalls
i.e. how to avoid “bad decision”.
- Close minded
- Beware of advice
- Beware of advice
- Don’t believe everything you hear
- Overcompensate
- Decide too fast
- Let pedestrians define the walkways
- Decision is 2 step process, learning must come before deciding
- Never seize on the first available option, no matter how good it seems, before you’ve asked questions and explored.
- Everything looks bigger up close (step back)
- Doing nothing
- Cognitive dissonance
- Lack of patience (short sighted)
- Don’t be a donkey
- cost of not decide vs more information
- Over-squeeze dots
Personal
Goal
i.e. My desired outcome (“good enough”) for decision making.
Make practical decisions that align best with long term interest grounded by current situation.
Self Awareness
i.e. Who I am (nature & nurture, strength & weakness, desire & fear)
Only through a deep understanding of who I am then can I make decisions that are rational or reasonable.
Tools I use for better self awareness
- Meditation (Mindfulness & Clarity)
- Quizzes
- PrincipleYou
- Online quizzes
- Self Reflection (Daily, Weekly Journaling)
- Surveying others
- Peer reviews at work
- Radical candor
- Therapist
- Radical self-inquiry
Principles
i.e. the rules I’m following and sticking with when making decisions in similar situations
- Embrace reality and deal with it
- Own outcomes
- Be radically open-minded
- Understand ego and blind spots
- Understand people are wired very differently and appreciate “thoughtful disagreement”
- Triangulate view with believable people who are willing to disagree
- Prepare for the worst
- Second-order thinking
- Synthesize the situation through time
- I’m a very slow thinker
- Antifragile
Specific Examples
Career Change
- Promotion can be appealing (zoom in) but at cost of unwanted liability (zoom out)
- Change is inevitable but “timing is everything”
- Thinking inversely helps us avoid bad decisions