Focused - 152: Mental Models

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

David & Mike share some of their favorite mental models and how to use them for better sensemaking.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? I am doing well, friend. Thanks for asking. How about yourself? I'm doing great. Any day we get to talk about mental models is a good day. Yeah, this is an interesting episode. We've been kind of kicking this one around for a while. We're going to explain what mental models mean in a minute, but I think this is something that people interested in the ideas of staying focused, I think that something can really help them out. focused segment. We're going to be talking about team project management. I've been looking into that lately. I've got some struggles and some ideas. So if you're working with a team, we're going to talk about that. I think after all the mental model talk, getting into apps and workflows

might be kind of fun for a little bit. Let's get to mental models, Mike. What is a mental model? Well, a mental model is basically a representation of how something works. And they're really tools for sensemaking. And I first heard the term sensemaking from our buddy Nick Milo from Linking Your Thinking. And this definition, I just want to throw out here at the beginning that sense making is the action or process of making sense of or giving meaning to something. And so mental models are essentially lenses for looking at the world that help you make up understanding. And that leads to more knowledge about what to actually do with this information that's coming at you. Yeah. In one of the books we're going to recommend, there's a great quote from Charlie Munger. I think it's undeniably true that the

human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person's brain because it understands the most fundamental models, ones that will do the most work per unit. If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom. I think there's almost like a bigger thing about this. I've been thinking a lot about storytelling lately. With May the 4th, I wrote a blog post about why Star Wars is important to me. But one of the things that George Lucas did was he just took the hero's journey, the Joseph Campbell kind of template of a human story, and he applied it to laser swords. It wasn't like he came up with something new. He took something ancient.

And I think that's the reason it connected with me so well at that age. And I think there's some similarity with mental models. It's like as humans, we do have models in common that we don't acknowledge or sometimes we do. And I think acknowledging those and kind of turning them over a little bit and figuring out which ones can be of use to us in our day-to-day lives can really help you stay focused. I can absolutely see that, and I definitely agree.

We tend to think of everything in models. We look for patterns, and we love systems and frameworks. Anything that helps us really wrap our head around what is actually going on. We're going to gravitate towards that. And mental models are just another form of that. They're a form of structure that you can use to think about things. But what I love about this is that there's no right mental model. There's not one that's better than any other. mental model. There's not one that's better than any other. They're just different frameworks. They're different structures that you can use to support the way that you're thinking about something. And it's a lot of trial and error a lot of times to figure out which mental models

to use where. And also the right one in any situation kind of depends on what your desired outcome is. What are you trying to gain from looking at something through this mental model? But we're all just trying to make sense of the world around us. And so the more tools we have in our tool belt, the better we're able to do that. Well, I mean, I think also this kind of relates to the concept of energy conservation.

There's a story about Steve Jobs. He only wore a mock black turtleneck and jeans every day. And someone asked him why. And he said, because when I wake up in the morning, I don't have to think about what I'm going to wear that day. You know, you go in your closet, you pull it out. And that always resonated with me. I mean, given it's a trivial amount of energy, you use picking your wardrobe, but then multiply that to all the little things that you face every day. And building the structure to address or assess a problem is exhausting. It could be so exhausting,

but by the time you get to the point of using the tool, you're too tired to actually use it. And maybe another way to look at mental models is collecting a tool belt full of little different tools as screwdrivers and hammers and all the different things you might need to get through life and address problems. You're like, well, this might be a screwdriver problem. So let me apply that screwdriver to this problem and see how it i you know the thing is that these models that we're going to get into in the rest of the show are common to a lot of humans a lot of them go back a long time you know and they've been slightly modified and now we're verbalizing them more there's some really good books we're going to turn you on to but you can take, this experience of humanity and load up your tool belt with this,

with some of these resources, the show today, and some of the books we're going to recommend. I, I think it's, it's, um, it's shockingly helpful. Yeah. I love where you're going with the hammer and the screwdriver. I didn't make that connection. You're, you're the woodworker here, the two of us, but that's, uh, But that's a great analogy because a mental model, if you try to use it in the wrong situation, it's not going to make any sense. If you're trying to screw in a screw, you look at a hammer and like, what in the world is this for? I have no use for this. Yeah, well, you could put a screw in with a hammer, but it's not going to be pretty. You could put a screw in with a hammer, but it's not going to be pretty. Sure, sure. But you also use the word resonate.

And I think that's an interesting word. Basically, like what reverberates with you. Now, when I think of resonate, I think of like the musical term. And reverb is the thing that comes to mind. Sure. But a lot of times the things that resonate with you, they resonate because you are looking at that information through a particular lens. And so if something doesn't resonate, you can either discard that as, well, it's not important to pay attention to right now, which is totally valid. Or you could pick up a different lens and look at it that way. And then sometimes you do that and you're like, aha, now I get it. I use this tool and this is

totally the tool for the job. And I see now what the, what the significance of this information really is. Yeah. And, and that's why I think accumulating mental models is really helpful. You know, like we're going to talk through several of our favorites during today's show. And maybe one of them is like, Oh, I really like that. I mean, like I know, for example, map is not the territory is one of Mike Schmitz's favorite mental models because I hear it from you so often, right? That's a thing you're, that's a mental model you use a lot,

but that's not the only one, you know? And, you know, the more tools in the belt, the more notes of reverb you have, the more angles you have at this. In fact, that's one of the mental models. I'm getting ahead of myself. I do think there's something to it. I wanted to, before we even start, though,

I want to point out a book. There's actually now three of them, but the way I really got started is, I think, Mike, you told me about this, or Ernie Svensson, I forget who brought it up first, but somebody told me about this great book called The Great Mental Models. And I'm looking for the author's name. Who wrote this, Mike?

It is Shane Parrish of Farnham Street and Rihanna Baubin. I always butcher these last names, so I apologize if I got that one wrong. But it's a hardcover book. You can buy them off of Amazon. And for a long time, it was not available. It got recommended to me originally. It's been on my radar forever in the Bookworm Club. So Joe and I covered it for Bookworm a while back. Once it finally became available, I bought it, picked it for one of the episodes and absolutely loved it. That was volume one. And there's seven mental models in that particular book. They now have two other ones that I have. Maybe there's additional ones that they've released since then, Volume 2 and Volume 3, which have additional mental models.

And this isn't the only place that you can find these things, but this is absolutely the place to start because it's so well put together. It explains the value of mental models really, really well. And the chapters are put together in a way that they're very visual. They're very interesting. Lots of really cool stories. Yeah. And now there's two additional volumes. Volume two is physics, chemistry, and biology.

And that's got a science focus, obviously. And then the third one is systems and mathematics. And so I have read the first volume. And I have just recently purchased the third volume. But I don't do enough in physics, chemistry, and biology, I think, to get that one. And I bought them on Kindle. So I've been reading them,

and they're showing up all over my ReadWise now because I'm highlighting them so much. So you can get them in various formats. But like Mike said, they're, they're a lot more available now than they used to be. Uh, but these, these books are excellent and I would recommend getting them. It's $10 per book in Kindle. I think it's just a little bit more to get the hard copy and, uh, and, and excellent

book. So, you know, we, so we've been pumping up mental models so far, but there are issues with mental models, right? Even though you like the map is not the territory, that doesn't mean it applies in every circumstance you want to use it, right? Correct. Yeah, that's an important caveat here right at the beginning, is that all models are flawed in some way. all models are flawed in some way. And when you think about it through the analogy used earlier of the right tool for the job, you could say, well, this screwdriver is no good to me because I can't pound in nails with it. That's a flaw with the tool. Well, technically, I guess, yeah, you know, that's what we're saying here. Not every mental model is going to be applicable in every situation. You've got to kind of figure out which ones to use when. But I will say that that is

easier to do than it sounds, maybe. It's not like you have to be taking copious lab notes, and I tried this model, and this is what I experienced. We use that word resonate earlier. When a model clicks and you know this is the right tool for the job, it's blatantly obvious. You see things in a new way and you're like, oh, I get it. The light bulb goes on. But just recognize that no model is perfect and you can't use a single model everywhere. Yeah, agreed. All right. I think we should start with your favorite. We've already mentioned it a few times. A mental model is, and this is in The Great Mental Models, Volume 1, the map is not the territory. Explain what that means, Mike. Sure. Well, the map is not the territory basically says that any map that you look at is not going to be the territory that it's describing just because the territory that it's describing, there's all this information.

And if you were to have a map that accurately represented the territory, it would be as big as the territory it was representing. useless as a map because most of us think of maps prior to smartphones as this foldable thing that you're gonna take with you on a road trip or something right and it's gonna you're gonna stick it in the back pocket of your car i remember when i turned 16 and got my driver's license my dad make sure you've got that atlas in the back of your car at all times yeah yeah right yeah i can i'm not gonna go into it but yeah when i grew, that was like part of the rite of passage is getting maps when you got a driver's license. a whole bunch of information into a few things that really matter, which are the major highways, the roads that you're going to take as you plan and execute your trip. So someone has decided what is important enough to go on that map. That someone is called a cartographer. And that's a fascinating concept to me because as you think about all of this connected note-taking

and building a second brain and all that kind of stuff, all this information that you collect and all these mental maps that you create, you don't have to collect all the information. You don't have to represent all of the information. You are the cartographer of your own mind. I really like that. It gives you power to be opinionated and choose, this is important to me, but this one's not. And I'm not going to worry about that. This is the thing that I'm going to put on my map. And your map could be anything you're trying to figure out, could be anything you're trying to figure out, any problem you're trying to solve.

I mean, my first application of this concept was when I was trying to figure out, what do I really think on the topic of habits? Because I've got James Clear's habits over here, and Charles Duhigg's habits over here, and this fog behavior model from Tiny Habits over here. How does all this stuff fit together? And really, what do I think about this? And once I realized that I have the power to make decisions based on my opinions of what should be here and then forced myself to create via text, codify my thoughts on that particular topic, the moment that I did that, everything just kind of clicked into place. So if you're trying to chart your way through something

that you don't really understand, this is a really powerful mental model, I believe. Yeah, I feel like this model actually works for me on two levels. The first, which you've kind of been talking about, is that it empowers me as the cartographer to create the map the way I want to, right? And as I figure out what's important to me, I mean, I have the little Sparky OS,

you know, kind of my own operating system. I am making my map and I understand where the areas of Memphis and D-Memphis are. But it also, I think, another layer to this idea, this mental model is in looking at other people's maps. They actually mention the London Underground in the book. And it made me smile because the first time I went to London, they have this gorgeous underground map that is really clearly laid out because it's a

pretty complicated you know system to uh to move around London and it's a public transit system which I'm not really familiar with because I grew up in Southern California we don't have I mean we have buses but we really don't have the type of uh public transit system like you find in New York or San Francisco or London and the the first time I got there, I was going somewhere and I looked at the number of stops and the map. I'm like, oh, that's not too far. And then it ended up, I was like 45 minutes out from where I thought I would be because the map is not to scale. The London Underground map is designed to make it easy to understand how many stops you need to go and where you need to transition. It's not made to show you actually how far out you're going,

you know? And I think anybody who grew up there would know that. Anybody who grew up in any city with a public transit. But the first time I did it, I blundered my way into it. And, and, and that's a good reminder. I mean, that's a, that's a very obvious reminder, but anytime someone throws a map at you, whether it be how to, you know, get to Churchill's bunker or how to, you know, how to figure out your next career choice. I mean, maps, there's all kinds of maps, right? But if somebody else is making the map, that's where you need to like, be willing to step in and figure out what their assumptions were. I mean, every episode of the show we make, Mike and I are making assumptions. You need to kind of be on page with that to get the most out of what we're saying.

And then you have to rewrite it in your own words and make your own assumptions. That's really where the power comes. You don't just apply what somebody else got from their map, but you make your own map. And then you're not just going to have a single map. You're going to have lots of these maps, which are going to overlay one another. those Venn diagrams, right? Where you have the two circles that overlap and they color in the center part and this is the intersection and this is where the magic happens sort of a thing. Well, that's kind of the place that you overlay different maps depending on what your outcome is, what outcome you're trying to achieve. I did a presentation actually with Nick Milo. We did a sense-making workshop and he talked about a different mental model called pace layers, which are kind of like that, except all of these layers are constantly moving. All these maps are constantly moving and they're constantly overlapping in different ways. And the more control and ownership you take over that process and the more you figure out how

these things collide and what that means to you, the more sense you can make of the world around you. Yeah. Well, that's the trick, isn't it? And it's a never-ending journey too. Like you can't just say, well, there, I did this. I applied this mental model. I got my revelation. Now I'm done. It doesn't work that way. You've got a little bit more understanding, but this is a continual journey. And there's a whole lot more that you don't know than what you do know. Even if you are really, really smart and you've collected a whole bunch of mental models and gathered a whole bunch of information,

it's still one small sliver of what is actually knowable out there. I feel like one of my biggest failures to apply this mental model is looking at other people's maps. And very frequently, I make assumptions based on the way information is provided to me that are not true. And, you know, if I could remember this mental model more often, I think it would help me.

But what are some of the areas of your life where the map is not the territory becomes, you know, important to you or relevant relevant well the the biggest one for me is anytime i'm trying to figure out what i decide about something i create again shouting out nick milo just i can't say enough nice things but he's a friend of ours but even before that i went i paid for i went through his his linking your thinking workshop and got a ton out of it. He introduced me to the concept of maps of content. And maps of content is basically like you encounter something you don't understand. He calls it a mental squeeze point. And you say, okay, this is a candidate for a map of content. You create a new blank note on whatever the topic is. Like I said, I did one on habits,

but I've got a whole bunch of them at any given moment inside of obsidian, ding, from like, what do I want to do with the men's ministry at my church? Or I'm thinking about, you know, whatever the topic is. Let me just look and see what some of the ones that I've got currently. I've got one on meditation. I've got one on journaling. I've got one on idea emergence and development.

Got one on graph views, faith and productivity, personal knowledge, management systems, workflows. These are all different topics that I'm creating these maps of. And then whenever I encounter something that fits one of those topics, I'll capture that little bit of information. I'll just dump it in that note. And occasionally I'll go into Obsidian. I'll just open up one of those notes and I'll look at everything I've collected and I'll read through it all. And then I'll say, okay, so what do I, Mike Schmitz, think about this stuff? And I force myself to have an output to create a couple of sentences on this is what I like about this, this is what I don't like about this.

So the public example I share all over the place from the habit stuff is the Charles Duhigg model, the cure routine reward that never really sat right with me, but I copied that and I threw it in that, that map of content. And then when I sat down and looked at him, like, why doesn't that sit right with me? And then I look at, you know, James Clear's models, which is right there and adds that fourth step. Oh, that fourth step is really the missing piece. And then, you know, same sort of thing happened when I looked at the, the BJ Fogg behavioral model. I'm like, oh, motivation, ability. These are key things that will determine whether that loop happens or not. You know, and so it kind of all blends together. But there's a saying that thoughts disentangle

themselves through lips and pencil tips. That is absolutely true, but also clicky keyboards. entangle themselves through lips and pencil tips. That is absolutely true, but also clicky keyboards. So talking through things on a podcast like this helps me solidify my thoughts on things. I don't always get the chance to do that. And I'm more of an introvert anyways. So the default way that I do that is I just force myself to type something, have an opinion about all this information that I've collected, and then give myself permission to change that opinion down the road as I get new information. Well, I find Map Is Not Territory to be a great mental model that works in two directions. It seems to me like I've been focused a lot on applying it when I look at other people's maps, and you are empowering yourself with that mental

model for your own maps. And maybe that's something I need to look into as well. I mean, I do what you talk about. I do have, I don't call them maps of content, but I do figure out what I believe and think about things based on what I've read elsewhere. But I never really thought of it in terms of this mental model. So thanks for that. Well, I mean, journaling could essentially be described as a form of mapping out the territory, right? Stuff happens throughout your day and you force yourself at the end of the day

to reflect on it and how you really felt about the things that have happened. So there's lots of different versions for this. You don't have to go full plain text like I did. Just look for opportunities to say, okay, here's everything that is available to me, and this is the important stuff, and this is what I think about that. It is worth noting that the map is not the territory. It's got a visual component to the actual mental model, but you're describing words. You know, you're not

drawing a map of habit apps or habit routines. You're actually just writing it in words. I mean, it doesn't matter. I guess that's what I'm saying. Yep. Whatever tool you need to make sense of the situation, do it. And then the map is not the territory. It's just recognizing that, okay, so any sort of map that I look at, this is somebody who has decided what's important. And a lot of times we pick up a map for a specific purpose. How do I get from point A to point B? So it's obvious what are the relevant points of information. But when you take that model and you say, how can I apply, how can I put on the cartographer hat in whatever arena, it opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities. K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash focused. Collide sends employees important, timely, and relevant security recommendations for their Mac, Linux, and Windows devices right inside of Slack.

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And I like this one because this is an example of a mental model that you should sometimes use and sometimes not use. So that statement, the simplest solution is the best solution, that's the kind of thing that you can hear in one of those productivity books and be like, oh, yes, absolutely. 100%. I'm going to use this everywhere. And that would be the wrong approach, I would argue. Yeah. You should consider it often and you should use it sometimes. Usually, the simplest solution is the best solution. It's the fewer things that can break, the easier to stick with. I mean, no matter what context you're applying it in, whether it being fixing the leaky faucet or figuring out what you're going to do with your life, sticking with the simplest solution is

usually better, but not always. Yeah. I know several people who they would have the type of personality that if they just applied this everywhere, that would actually be a good thing. But there are also personalities that I don't want to know all the information. naturally gravitate towards the simplest solution. And what that ends up being is kind of the easy way out. There's more information that could help you make a better decision and you're just too lazy to go gather it. And I say that because that is me sometimes. Sometimes I'm just like, I reach decision fatigue. It's just like, I don't even want to think about this. This is the thing that's right in front of us. Let's just do that. Yeah. I am just the opposite. I tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. So this is one that I need to pay more attention to. Well, I think everybody does that in specific areas. And so if there's an area that you tend to do that, then yeah, that would be a place to apply this mental model. Because in the book, they talk about how simpler solutions are actually more

likely to be right than complicated ones. And there's a lot of things that go into that. There's a lot of factors that we use for decision making. The book that comes to mind is The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul and all the different ways that we think about things that we don't really connect all those dots, but our brain is doing it subconsciously. Those are data points that the brain is using to say, this one over here, this is the obvious one. And if you are an analytical or logical type of person who wants to collect all the information and over-research things, you can collect all these information and over-research things, you know, you can collect all these data points and you just end up making it worse.

You know, after 30 minutes of research, you've got a pretty good idea of which one to go with. But after 20 hours of research, you're more confused than ever. Yeah. You can definitely talk yourself out of the right answer. Anybody who's ever taken a multiple choice test knows that. answer. Anybody who's ever taken a multiple choice test knows that. That's it in a nutshell. Yeah, exactly. You can talk yourself out of the right answer. So don't do that whenever possible. The way I think of this rule is when I am thinking about multiple solutions to something, one of my considerations is, well, what is easier? What is simpler? What is the one that is going to take the fewest number of steps? And like I said earlier, this applies not to just fixing a problem in the world,

but fixing a problem in my brain. But I think, once again, you don't want to simplify this to the point that it's too simple. I mean, I was just thinking about task managers. I've written a lot about task manager of the year. So I hear from a lot of people on the internet who are trying different task managers. And a lot of times they'll say, well, I'm using this system. What do you think? And my standard response is you need a system as complex as you require it to be, but no more complex than that. And if you need it to have

certain features, that's great. But if you don't need those additional features, then don't use them because all you're doing is adding complexity. Exactly. I mean, that's the reason why this mental model doesn't work in all situations, because if you just always use the simplest solution, doesn't work in all situations because if you just always use the simplest solution, you'd use post-it notes or reminders and that's not going to be enough for some people. I think it was Albert Einstein who said that you should make things as simple as possible but no simpler. With Occam's razor, if you just say the simplest solution is the best solution 100% of the time, there's the chance that you go beyond that threshold and you pick something that actually isn't the right solution for you. All that said, often for me, the simplest solution

is the best solution. Yep. There's another mental model on first principles thinking. Could you explain that one? Yeah. First principles thinking is essentially you're looking at your situation and it doesn't make sense. So you break it down into the component parts. You're breaking it down to the basics, right? So one story that I like about this, I like about this, disregard the personality, I guess. But Elon Musk with SpaceX is a pretty fascinating story because he wanted to send the first rocket to Mars back in 2002. But the cost of rockets, he recognized, was insanely expensive. It was like $65 million to launch a single rocket. So he just kept breaking it down, these first principle thinkings. What is a rocket made out of? Aerospace grade aluminum alloys,

titanium, copper, carbon fiber. And what he ended up doing was he bought a manufacturing plant so he could manufacture those materials himself, cut the cost of launching a rocket by 10 times, and was able to launch a bunch of rockets, make the mistakes, learn from them. That's an example of first principles thinking is like, okay, so this idea of a rocket, this is a really complicated idea, but what are the essential components of these things? Okay, I know how to manufacture those. So if I can figure out how to manufacture those, I can put those together into this more complicated thing. And you're kind of looking at your situation from a different perspective. It's really like, what can I make from these component parts? And a lot of times

what you do when you break it down to those component parts is you realize that they can go back together in a different way than you disassembled them. And so it can actually help you discover new solutions across different genres or categories. Yeah, this one is my version of the map is not the territory. I love this mental model and I've been using it even before I knew it existed my whole life. When I was ending my law school career, I got a job clerking for a federal judge, you know, and what you do in that job is, you know, the judge has a bunch of lawyers writing briefs, asking him to do things. And he would have clerks come in like me, law students or recent graduates to review all the, the, the, the authorities and the, the citations and try to

figure out what the laws and what the proper answer is to this question before the judge. So that was my job. And I remember at one point the judge was going out of town and he had an appeal from the bankruptcy court. He's just hanging with me. I know this is a long story, but there's a point. And the judge says, hey, Sparky, he didn't call me Sparky, but anyway, he says, deal with this, you know, figure out what this appeal is right or not. And I'm like, judge, I didn't even take bankruptcy law in law school. I'm not ever going to be a bankruptcy lawyer. It's like, you'll figure it out. And he leaves out of town. And so I had to figure it out. And it was like, the two lawyers were top-notch Los Angeles

bankruptcy attorneys in front of a bankruptcy judge appointed for his specialized knowledge of the bankruptcy code. And one of the lawyers wrote a brief with first principles thinking, basically, this is a bankruptcy. And he just started from the most fundamental building block and I followed his brief and it really helped me understand his position. Whereas the other lawyer, rather than started 50,000 feet, he started about six inches above the ground, you know, and, you know, and it took me the full week to fully digest what he was arguing. And it was such an eye opener for me. And my entire legal career, I wrote every brief with first principle thinking ideas because I figured, I don't know who's going to read this. I don't know if this person's going to know anything about this stuff. I need to bring them on the journey. about this stuff, I need to bring them on the journey. And then if you look at the stuff I do as Max Barkey, whether it's the field guides or the podcast or whatever, I always try to start with fundamental building blocks with anything I'm trying to communicate to people. Because

I don't know if you, dear listener, have ever heard of such a thing as a mental model. So we have to start from the beginning. And I do this with everything I teach, and I also do it with everything I try to learn. And I find this to be a mental model of tremendous value. fact that you can say okay well i understand a and i understand b but then when you figure out what possibilities combining those open up to it can lead to some pretty fascinating things like there's a another story about the gutenberg press and the gutenberg press was this contraption which was a combination of a screw press and movable type, which movable type had been around for hundreds of years at this time. It was invented by the Chinese, but it wasn't great for a lot of the Chinese characters because they were so complex. So Gutenberg looks at this movable type technology. He looks at the screw press technology and he wanted to get lay people access to the Bible in English instead of just having the priest be the only people who could

read it in Latin in 1440, he creates the printing press. So these are two things that have been around for a long time and he combined them in a totally different way and completely changed the world. And wasn't the group press like invented to make wine? I think that was like, I mean, it's crazy. And I guess that's the idea. You know, another angle to this mental model is that if you can break down whatever you're thinking about into its first principles, into its fundamental building blocks, then you might come up with a combination of those blocks that nobody else has before. And isn't that awesome when that happens?

Mm-hmm, right. Another one here is inversion. And this one isn't too complicated. It's just looking at things from a different perspective, a different angle. I think an easy version of this for the audience that listens to Focused might be beginning with the end in mind, the Stephen Covey habit, and the exercise of what do you want people to say at your funeral? By the end of your life, what do you want to have accomplished or achieved?

That's an example of inversion. It's really just jumping ahead and saying, I do or I don't want to achieve this specific outcome. So another version of this might be, I don't want to turn into my parents. I don't want to do the things that they did. That's maybe a negative version of it, but it is an example of inversion. You've got this thing you want to avoid. Okay, so then you come back to today and what are the things that I can do today which are going to

lead me towards that desired outcome or away from that negative outcome? Yeah, I don't really have a lot to add to this one. Well, I'll share a story with this one because this is near and dear to my heart. In 2017, so five years ago, my wife and I got away for overnight. And in the morning, we sat down at a coffee shop and we created, because I am a nerd, Schmidt's Family Guiding Principles. And the basic version of that was we detailed what we wanted our family to look like, the

type of relationship we wanted to have with our kids by the time they got to be teenagers. And this is kind of starting from just things that I identified in my own relationship with my parents that I wanted my relationship with my kids to be better in this specific area. It doesn't matter what it is. Everybody can find something they want to do differently than their parents, right? But this was important to me, and I wanted to make sure that they felt like they could talk openly and honestly about anything at any time. So, okay, what are the things that we're going to do to get there? And we continued down that thought process and ended up identifying what we call our Schmitz family core values.

And we've talked about this on the show before, but I had a graphic designer friend create a manifesto type graphic that I printed, got it framed. It's hanging on our living room wall. Wife still thinks that that's the best gift that I've ever given her. And so that's like an extension of this inversion principle is like, where do we want to get to? Okay, well, how does that affect today? And then what we did is we created an artifact, a physical object, which we look at every single day. It's hanging on our living room wall. Then that's a reminder of the decisions that we make are supposed to be in alignment with these values, and that's going to lead us into a desired outcome. By the way, I noticed in the focused forum that someone had posted today, as we record this, how they took this core values exercise and they had this really great experience rafting in the Grand Canyon. And they had gone through and identified what are the things that are really important to me. And instead of just thinking like, oh, that was great. I don't want to go back to work.

They actually started thinking, how could I do this for a living? Now that's what they're doing. They're our whitewater rafting guide. And they're like, this is what I love to do. And they're so excited about it because they took the time to identify these core values. So a lot of good can come from using this mental model. Yeah, we did something kind of similar, less formalized when our kids were born. Our first kid was born. We, we sat down and said, okay,

now we have the job of growing a human, you know, what are we looking for in the final product? You know, and, uh, we came up with two words. We wanted compassion and we wanted independence for our kids. We wanted them to be compassionate humans and capable of taking care of themselves. But that was the mental model for us is, you know, when we were thinking about decisions for them or things we wanted to teach them, was it leaning into compassion and independence? And, you know, it sounds silly, but, you know, now my kids are getting toward the end of that project and we look at them and we're like, you know what, we raised two compassionate, independent people. So, you know, we're, we're on target for this product,

you know, for lack of a better term. I love that. And I, that doesn't bother me to talk about your family in terms of a project or a product. Maybe some people bristle at that. But really, whatever is valuable to you, you should be doing your very best to manage and steward that well. And the fact that you had a project for this to create compassionate individuals just shows that you're taking the responsibility seriously. It's not dehumanizing to me in any way, but just my two cents. In hindsight, it was a mental model for us because every decision we made or most of the big decisions we made went through that filter.

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qualified applicant, not available for all users need to hire. You need indeed our thanks to indeed for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay FM. Here's another one that I really like. It's Hanlon's razor. And it's the idea that you should not attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Yes. You know what? I didn't really encounter

this mental model until probably the last 10 years, sometime that came up. And I really like it because I think so often as humans, we attribute everything to malice. The world has it out for me. Oh, he didn't say hi to me this morning when we were getting coffee, so he doesn't like me. And of course, it has nothing to do with you at all. He's thinking about delivering Girl Scout cookies for his daughter or something. It has nothing to do with you. And so often I think this is a trap we fall into. So I like this model. Yeah, this one, I think everybody can relate to this. A very basic version of this would be somebody cuts you off in traffic, right? So

how do you respond? We tend to judge other people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. And this is basically just give the other party the benefit of the doubt. Don't assume that bad results are the fault of a bad actor is how they phrase it in the great mental models. the great mental models. But the story that goes along with this is absolutely fascinating. So do you know who Vasily Arkhipov is? No. They were on a Russian, a Soviet submarine during the Cold War. And what had happened was that the Americans had informed the Soviets that they were going to drop these charges in international waters to force submarines to surface. And this was on October 27th, 1962. However, that message did not go from Soviet HQ down to the nuclear

subs, which were in the area. So you can see how this could be a very bad situation. Yeah, I've heard this story. I didn't know the name. Yeah, so Vasily Arkhipov was aboard one of these nuclear subs when a charge went off, and everybody assumed, except Vasily, that they were being attacked, and they wanted to fire the nuclear torpedoes.

But they had this rule that everyone, I don't know if it was everyone on the sub or everyone in the leadership, but basically everyone had to be in agreement and give the command to fire the torpedo and he wouldn't do it. He said, no, let's get up to the surface and figure out what is really going on. And he single-handedly stopped nuclear war. Nuclear annihilation, yeah. There's a couple stories like that from the Cold War where we were on the edge because of something silly. And I think this is one, though,

that you really should wear on your sleeve because I just think as humans, it's so easy for us to get caught up in taking things personally. And I guess I've kind of expanded this mental model. I guess a related corollary would be, it's not about you. Whenever you see somebody and whatever they're exhibiting, it's not about you. I had a Buddhist teacher once who told me this great story how she had picked up a Buddhist teacher from Vietnam. He had come over here and she picked him up at the airport. And they were driving from LAX down to Orange County and there was a car accident that they got hit.

You know, somebody banged into their car. So they pulled over and the, the guy driving the other car got out and started screaming at them. Right. You know, so imagine this, this old monk, you know, getting out of the car and started screaming at him. And the monk says to him, he says, are you okay? You know, is, would you like to talk to the, the monk was worried about the guy because he was so animated, right? It wasn't that he thought that the man was mad at him, but he was worried about the man's own health because of the way he was acting. And that was such a great lesson.

It's like, yeah, we know when somebody goes off on you, maybe they need your compassion more than they need you to be angry back at them. Yep, exactly. But either way, I think I went off the reservation there a little bit. So sorry, gang. But yeah, Hamlin's razor, don't attribute malice to what can be attributed to stupidity. You know, I think my issue with that is just stupidity. I think maybe another correlate would be don't attribute to mal. It can be attributed to anything else. Sure. Yeah. I don't think most humans go around with malicious intent.

At least that's not been my experience. Yeah. Yeah. That's maybe a friendlier way to say it is don't assume malicious intent. There are fewer true villains out there than you suppose. Yeah. And I guess the place where I would just encourage everybody to start looking for stuff like this is online. And I know that there's a lot of really bad people who do really bad things online. But when someone says something that rubs you the wrong way, don't assume that they're trying to get under your skin because that's the type of thing that you can get upset about that and it can just eat at you for, for days. And the other person, the only person that affects is you. The other person isn't upset about it.

They probably didn't mean it at all. It just, they didn't communicate it very well. And you know, they've moved on. So by just stewing on it it the only person that it's it's really hurting is is you well i feel like inversion hand lens razor a lot of these things in our modern kind of anonymized discourse uh could could help us deal with it better um and i guess another thing i would add to this whole idea of malice is you do occasionally meet people that have malice in their heart. While I said earlier, not everybody is like, most people aren't like that. When you encounter a person like this, and this is just me being sparky here, but don't argue with them, don't fight with them, just get them out of your life. Just get away from them because you're not going to fix whatever it is driving them. And it just, you just get away. An escape from a person like that is success. You're never

going to fix them, you know? Yep. Exactly. Is that a mental model, Mike? I'm not sure, but we ended up there. It is because, I mean, a lot of these mental models and a lot of things that you've taught me from the whole idea of mindfulness meditation, those are mental models. It's ways of looking at things and it just is optimized for the outcome of not getting upset. And so, yeah, absolutely. That's a mental model. Mental models are everywhere. I guess that's the point of these series of books is they have all these different areas. And I know you mentioned volume two, you didn't pick up. I did just because I wanted to have this whole set of them. But the

next one here, compounding, I think this is one of the math ones. And in the math section, I was, I don't really care about the math principles, but I see this applied in so many other areas. The big thing that I see recently that really just leans into this whole compound idea is all of the writing recently on habits. And just do the right thing every day, James Clear. Don't miss the second day. Jerry Seinfeld, don't break the chain. This is leveraging this idea of compounding. And there's a really cool story I heard one time that

goes along with this about the guy who invented the game of chess. And the story goes that the king of the country where the man resided, it's like, this is amazing. What do you want for this incredible invention? And the man said, I want one grain of rice doubled for every square on the chessboard. So one for the first, two for the second, four for the third, and so on. And the king initially was a little disappointed that the guy didn't ask for more he didn't think that was valuable enough but then he came back a week later and asked the royal treasurer if he paid the guy yet and he's like no we don't have enough because that's like 8 000 trillion grains of rice.

Another version of this, which maybe is the more popular version, is if you take a penny and you double it every day for 30 days, you've got $5 million at the end of the month, something like that. The truth is, though, that if you just continually do the right thing, that compound effect kicks in and that's the force multiplier for achieving the outcome that you want. And there's a big reason why I'm not a fan of goals because goals are just, so this is the outcome I want to achieve. And they force you to kind of think additively, like what's the thing I can do that's going to get me there? And you lose the value of

just focusing on just show up every day, do this thing. If you show up every day and do this thing, and you make it as small and as simple as possible, but you do it consistently enough, you're going to make a whole lot more progress, and it's going to feel a whole lot more effortless than if you approached it through the goal mindset. Yeah. So the idea of building on it, making it stronger, I mean, that does lay into so much of the wheelhouse of things we've talked about on this show in the past. And by the way, I just bought the second one now. Thank you, Mike. There's this thing, dear listener, where Mike buys a book that I'm not sure about. Then he tells me he read it and it's good.

And then I buy the book. So I think Amazon, uh, is very thankful for the existence of Mike Schmitz. Yeah. I buy a lot of books. It's true. Okay.

So let's talk about randomness. Randomness. Uh, there's not a whole lot that I have to add to this one but i think the thing to recognize here is just that a lot of the the positive outcomes that we think we've created by our ability to set goals and things like that actually we were in the right place at the right time and so there is an element of randomness that is always present. And recognizing that it actually is very freeing. It's not depressing like you kind of initially maybe think it is. The thing that kind of ties into this for me is from 4,000

Weeks by Oliver Berkman, the cosmic insignificance theory. You're one small blip in the universe. And so the negative pessimistic view of that is what you do doesn't really matter. But actually, that's a positive thing because what I do doesn't really matter. I can do whatever I want. I can figure things out. I can make some mistakes. The whole world is not going to come crashing down because I made a wrong choice. That's the positive side of this randomness. Or you could be like Zaphod and just assume that you're the center of the entire universe, even though you're so small. True.

I find that this concept is good. It's a good mental model for me when I have success. Because the ego is the enemy, right? Ryan Holiday wrote the book on that. And I do think that when we have success in our lives, and I've had some success lately. I was able to shut down my law practice and I've been able to turn Max Barking into a thing,

but I'm not discounting the effect of random luck and just good fortune in getting there. And I'll take some credit. I worked hard, but also in a lot of times I was in the right place at the right time and was around the right people and got lucky. And I think that really kind of helps keep me grounded. Yep. The flip side of that is when things don't go exactly right. And you say, I don't understand. I did everything I could and it didn't work. And you know what? Sometimes that just happens. You know, I mean, it's not a character failing that you didn't succeed. It's just sometimes the stars don't align. In fact, it's shocking the number of times they do. Yeah. And this isn't, this isn't

saying that you shouldn't try to deconstruct things and figure out why something didn't work, for example. But just recognizing that you don't have complete control over all of the variables that go into creating the outcome that you want. Yeah. One place this really stood out for me was Creativity Inc., the Ed Catmull book on Pixar. There were multiple times during Pixar's rise where things went a little awry, where they were near bankrupt many times, or they were almost purchased by big company X. And at the last minute, that deal fell through. And they all thought it was the worst thing ever.

But at the end of the day, they had to have all these random events happen to them that put them in the place to become the Pixar that they are. I think, didn't we talk on the show about the farmer's son? I think we did that very recently. But that was kind of the whole idea of the parable. It's like, you don't know how all this stuff's going to play out. It's okay. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And like Mike said, that doesn't mean you mail in your effort, but it does mean that when it goes right, don't assume that you're a genius. And when it goes wrong, don't assume that you're an utter failure either. Yeah. You had a part, but it's not as big as you think it was. Yeah. But you know, it's funny how many of these mental models relate to each other. Like I feel like this really

relates to Hanlon's razor and it's just another look at that. Yep. Exactly. Another easy one here would be the Pareto principle, which is the 80-20 rule. And again, decide where you want to apply this. But it, in short, basically says that 80% of the value that you would get from whatever you're trying to do is going to come from 20% of the effort. is going to come from 20% of the effort. And when you're thinking about what sort of things you could select for projects and what sort of habits you want to create

and how do I want to time block my day? Like, what do I really want to get done? This is a really important concept because a lot of times you can't do it all. And so it kind of comes back to the episode on moving the needle. What are the things that are really going to move the needle? And you can actually extend this even further, I believe. So you can 80-20 the 80-20, where there's only a couple of things that are really going to move the needle. There may be, you know, out of the 100% of activities that are out there, 80% of the value

comes from the 20% that actually move the needle. But of that 20% that actually move the needle, there's probably 6%, 4%, whatever, I can't do my math in my head, that really are going to make significant progress. These are like your keystone habits, the things that I absolutely am going to do this every single day, no matter what, right? So that's like the 80-20 of the 80-20. Yeah, I find this mental model very useful when I feel overwhelmed. It's easy when you have too much to not be able to figure out what needs to get done. I mean, there are some times in your life where there is more on your plate than you have time to address and to step back to the 80, 20, you know, it's the 20% of this that's going to really matter, you know, and stop and do that. That is the,

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timingapp.com slash focus to try timing for free and save 10% when you subscribe. Our thanks to timing for the support of the focus podcast and all of relay FM. Another mental model is feedback loops. You want to talk to us about feedback loops? This is another one another one that I constantly rely upon. I think that everybody, whatever you're doing in your life, you always want to ship good stuff, right? But I think it's very easy to get yourself paralyzed because you never think it's good enough to send out the door. And the mental model of feedback loops gives me the freedom to ship things. feedback loops gives me the freedom to ship things. And, and then when I find out what people like and don't like, or what works and doesn't work, then I can refine it. And, uh, I love feedback

loops. I use them not only with other people, but I use them on myself as well when I'm trying out new things. And, uh, this is just, this is just a mental model that I, that I am very comfy with. I have a spare room in the mental model building. The mental model hotel. There we go. I was almost there. I was almost there. I like this too. This is basically built on the belief that you can't see everything from your perspective.

And for a creator, this is extremely important because it's how you combat perfectionism, which I deal with. I made this mistake when I did my faith-based productivity course. I went into my hole and I built it. And I built it the way that I thought it should be built. And I launched it to the world. But it resonated with me, not anybody else though. And that's the danger you run into when you just create something in a silo. You need to get it in front of other people and you need to see what they think about it, what they like, what they don't like. And then those are just data

points that you collect and you say, okay, well, that's good feedback. I'll make a change to accommodate that one. But a lot of times you'll get feedback like, well, I don't really care that that particular view of this thing. I'm not going to give credence or wait to, I'm not going to listen to that voice, right? So you're not just letting everybody else design your thing, which maybe is why people are hesitant to do this because they don't want to be influenced by what other people want. They think that maybe that will water down the amazing thing that they're trying to put out into the world. But this is essential. You need to ship something, get some feedback, ship again. And the real valuable creative work comes from

that repetitive process and doing it consistently. There's that compounding mental model again. Let's talk about relativity. That's another mental model. And the gap versus the gain, which is another frequently discussed concept on the show. I love this one. So the gap versus the gain is an idea I picked up from Dan Sullivan. And the gap, from Dan Sullivan. And the gap, let's start with that one. Basically, you have this goal that you want to achieve, this ideal outcome, your ideal future. By the time I'm X years old, I'm going to have done Y, right? And then it doesn't happen. You make progress, but not as much as you think you should. So you have these points, like if you're viewing these three circles vertically, this one's like right in the middle, right? And you're looking up at this picture you've created of where you think you should be,

and you don't measure up, and you get frustrated, and that is known as the gap. So the alternative here is not to discount all the progress that you've made. And instead of being frustrated that you're not where you wanted to be, you look back at where you began, and that way you can see the growth. So if you've got these three circles now, you've got where you are in the middle, where you want to be, your ideal future, whatever, that's at the top. And then where you started is at the bottom. And when you measure vertically from where you started to where you are, you see the

growth or you see the gain. And that creates the motivation and the momentum to keep going. And this is yet another plug for a journaling habit. Because if you journal, you can go back and you can look at those things and you can see how you were feeling or how you were frustrated and you can see how you overcame a problem and you can see that growth and you're like, oh, actually, I guess I'm doing better than I thought. And it is funny how us humans are so good at looking at the gap and so bad at looking at the gain that we need a mental model to kind of force us to do it. It also kind of relates to the idea of multiple perspectives, relativity, and just like you have a perspective usually of looking at the gap and not the gain,

but just general expanded perspectives. I don't know if there is a mental model around that, but it seems to me like this is kind of an offshoot of that. Yeah, absolutely. The gap versus the gain is the one that I love, but there's so many other examples that you could use here. I remember you telling me the story about the person with the lines of code at Apple, right? And they wrote a handful of lines

and they actually deleted a whole bunch of lines. And the metric that they were being judged on was how many lines did you add? How many lines did you create? They had a different reference point, different anchor point, and their definition of success because of that different anchor point was completely different than somebody else. And so you can apply this any area of your life and really just figuring out where are the points where you should be anchoring from. That's the valuable exercise with this.

valuable exercise with this. You mentioned a minute ago how when you look at the gain versus the gap, that allows you to carry forward with momentum and inertia, but that is a separate mental model. Yes, it is. The inertia and momentum, I mean, people have kind of heard this before, probably like objects that are in motion tend to stay in motion. And the picture of the steam engine, you know, it takes a while to get going, but you keep that fire hot enough. Eventually you build up that momentum and then it's easier to keep it going. think fits this mental model. I'm going through the Ship 30 for 30 program, which is writing and publishing every day for 30 days. And even though I do a lot of stuff creatively, I have to admit that I was terrified to start this. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, especially with written words because I feel those, they just feel more permanent to me. And so I want to be a bit of a perfectionist, especially with written words, because I feel those, they just feel more permanent to me. And so I want to make sure I say it the right way.

So I was really scared about publishing the first thing and having to do that every single day. Like, what am I going to write about, right? What I've discovered through the experience, though, is that it's actually getting easier to ideate. And that's making the creative process easier, too, because I'm going through these reps of not being so attached to the perfect outcome and not trying to find the perfect idea. It's literally forcing me to just find whatever I'm thinking about and then write about it. And the act of writing about it, again, helps me crystallize the message in my own head.

So I've done that now. Today is day 19 as we record this, 19 days in a row. And I don't feel any of the apprehension to doing it that I did at the beginning. At this point, I've done it enough that I'm confident tomorrow I can have an idea and I can write something valuable enough to publish out into the world based on that. And this kind of combines with the feedback loops because by doing this every day, I'm getting a bunch of people who

are responding and sharing the stuff that I've written because it's published via Twitter. And saying, this is really good. I really appreciate you sharing this sort of thing. Oh, cool. I didn't know that was going to be helpful. Awesome. Glad you like it. So all the stories that I was telling myself in my head of like, I got nothing to share and this really isn't that revolutionary. No one's going to appreciate this. No one's going to care if I write about that. It's dispelling all of those false narratives that I've been playing in my head for quite a while. And you hung all of that on a mental model of momentum. That's nice. Exactly. And that's the way this stuff is supposed to

work for you. There's another one that we've mentioned or we've got in our outline about Dunbar's number. And that is like the maximum number of stable relationships a human can have. I think the original research was around 150. I hear this often. I don't really know what to think of this one. I mean, we live in a world where, you know, people have thousands of friends on Facebook. I am holding up air quotes, right? Are they friends? But we also live in a world where a lot of us interact with a lot fewer than 150 people in our day-to-day lives. So I'm not really sure where this one fits. Well, I think for me, this one I like, and I've learned a lot from because I tend to be a people pleaser. And really what this says is you're not going to make everybody happy. So

focus on the ones that really matter. I remember when I self-published my first book via Amazon and I got my first negative review and it ate away at me for weeks and I never met this person, never heard from them again. It was a very difficult lesson for me to learn. You know that not everybody who says something deserves to have a seat at the table in your mind. Not every voice is worth listening to. Okay. Well, I could see that as a way to use Dunbar's number. I actually feel like that the real intimate relationships in my life is a number far fewer than 150 though. I agree with that. I forget the specifics of what the different circles are there. And maybe it's different for different people. But yeah, you can't be everybody's friend, basically.

So who are the people who are really important to you? Who are the people who you want to allow to speak into your life and identify those people and prioritize those people? And then don't beat yourself up because your best friend from high school you lost touch with and you don't see eye to eye anymore. Just let that one go. Yeah. Another mental model is the idea of emergence. And we've talked about Nick Milo already in his Link in Your Thinking course, but that's Nick's wheelhouse is emergence. Yeah. Specifically idea emergence, which I love. And again, this is something that

I got from the course before I ever interacted with Nick himself. But the idea in linking your thinking is that your ideas can emerge from different directions. And it could be something like, oh, I remember that thing and I go down and I find it, or it could be I navigated to this thing from a general, broader topic. There's lots of different vectors into these ideas and the creative process that is the natural output of these ideas. There's lots of other ways you could define emergent specifically, but that's the one that's valuable for me is recognizing like, where does a good idea come from? I'm fascinated with that, that topic. All right. Uh, so Mike, if people want to learn more about great mental models,

I would recommend they start with volumes one through three of the book. Any other resources you would recommend? Yes, I'll go through these rapid fire. There's a book called Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray. And this is one that I picked up from Ernie Svensson. This one basically talks about how there's this bubble of belief that everybody has, and this is built on your understanding of the world. And really, there's so much more information and so much more that's knowable. It kind of highlights how much you don't know. Think Again by Adam Grant is another great book just about understanding things from different perspectives. Those are the big resources.

But the big takeaway, I think, from this episode is not only collect these mental models, but try to figure out what is actually true. And in order to do that, you've got to get around people who think differently than you do. You have to seek those contrary opinions. Truth is out there everywhere. Recognize how much you don't know. Start looking for it and just learn from anyone and everyone. It doesn't have to be an expert. They don't have to have credentials and they don't have to teach you a specific methodology in order to give you something valuable and a different lens to look at the world. Just start looking for that stuff everywhere and keep what you want, discard the rest. You don't have to take and collect everything, but constantly be looking for those different perspectives. And that's kind of the thing that

we all need to do if we want to understand the world better and make better sense of everything that's happening around us. I'd also add that you shouldn't attach your ego to it. You know, when you bring the concept of mental models to this, this hunt that Mike is talking about, hopefully it allows you to separate from it because so many people today get so upset, you know, when they hear something contrary to what they believe that's where the valuable stuff is yeah it should make you uncomfortable right yep get comfortable with being uncomfortable i guess that's the best way to sum it up and don't take it personal honestly that i think there is lately this thing where everything is a zero-sum game and it just doesn't work that way.

If you want to build the best you, you have to be willing to go out on all that once in a while. Maybe even saw it off after you climb onto it. Yeah. I would love to hear from listeners if they have any additional mental models that have been really impactful for them. I love this topic. I've started collecting these. I know you have too, David, but I want to find out, you know, what are the ones that really have helped you? So go leave a comment in the forum, which is at talk.macpowerusers.com, correct? Yes. All right. Thank you also to our sponsors for this episode,

which is our friends at Collide, Indeed, and Timing. If you want to join us for Deep Focus, that is our members-only show, which has longer ad-free episodes. We'll be talking about team project management struggles today. And we'll talk to the rest of you in a couple of weeks.