Models

Systematic, predictable patterns in human judgment that cause people to deviate from rational thinking.

Reasoning from the most basic, verifiable truths of a problem rather than by analogy to convention.

Reasoning in terms of likelihoods and ranges of outcomes instead of treating predictions as certain.

Tracing the knock-on effects a decision causes beyond its immediate, obvious result.

Stripping a problem or system down to its essential parts so it becomes easier to understand and act on.

A prioritization grid that sorts tasks by urgency and importance into four quadrants to decide what to do, when.

A philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement carried out by everyone, everywhere, every day.

OKRs pair a qualitative objective with measurable key results to align and track quarterly strategy execution.

Structured, effortful practice with immediate feedback aimed at your specific weaknesses, not just repetition.

Memory fades on a predictable curve unless reinforced by reviews spaced increasingly far apart.

Thinking about your own thinking to monitor, evaluate, and improve how you learn and make decisions.

How returns earning returns of their own makes a quantity grow at an accelerating rate over time.

A five-day process for answering critical product questions through prototyping and user testing.

A system structure where output feeds back as input, either reinforcing a trend or balancing it back toward equilibrium.

A framework, from Eric Ries, for building new products under uncertainty through rapid build-measure-learn loops.

A deep-seated tendency to return favors, gifts, and concessions in kind, even when the first gesture was small or unsolicited.

The tendency to treat what other people are doing as evidence for the right thing to do.

A structured process for tracing a problem back to its underlying cause instead of its nearest symptom.

Form a testable hypothesis, gather evidence to test it, and revise the hypothesis based on the result.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: a framework for hitting a small number of key goals despite daily operational noise.

Ranking ways to intervene in a system from shallow, easy tweaks to deep changes in goals and mindset.

Setting a goal ten times bigger than the obvious one, because a 10x target forces a different strategy than a 10% one.

Applying 10x thinking to a project: asking what would make the outcome ten times bigger or faster, not 10% better.

Knowing your own unique strengths well enough to focus there, and others well enough to hand off the rest.

Knowledge that compounds into wildly disproportionate results through leverage, not just harder work.

Solving a specific problem right now, without building a reusable process around it.

Delivering work in small increments and adapting the plan continuously based on feedback.

The tendency to defer to authority figures even when their claim is wrong or outside their expertise.

Overweighting information that is vivid or easy to recall, and ignoring what is not top of mind.

95% safe, 5% very risky

The models we hold about how the world works, which filter what we notice and how we act.

Shoot for the moon, land on the stars

Randomly assigning subjects to conditions and hiding who got what, so results reflect the treatment and not bias or expectation.

The single slowest or most constrained step in a system that limits the throughput of the whole.

Whether a change is best explained by small parts driving the whole (bottom-up) or the whole shaping its parts (top-down).

A trade-off in social networks between bridging disconnected groups (brokerage) and tightly knitting one group together (closure).

How important or influential a node is within a network, based on its position and connections.

Grouping individual pieces of information into larger, meaningful units so the mind can hold more at once.

Variation in a process that comes from its normal, everyday operation rather than a single identifiable event.

Judging something relative to a recent reference point rather than on its own absolute terms.

A test that isolates one variable by comparing a treatment group against an otherwise identical control group.

Adding an inert placebo arm to an experiment to separate a treatment's real effect from the effect of merely being treated.

Combining and recombining existing ideas in new ways to imagine possibilities that do not yet exist.

Mapping a project's tasks and dependencies to find the longest sequence that determines the earliest possible completion date.

Obtaining ideas, content, or solutions by opening a task to a large group of people rather than a single expert.

The drive to explore and understand the unknown, which fuels learning and the discovery of new ideas.

Pair a different mental model with each decision time horizon: lifetime, years, months, and days.

The mind unconsciously distorts or blocks out painful reality it cannot bear to accept.

People react far more intensely to a loss, or a threatened loss, than to an equivalent gain.

Design for Lean Six Sigma: designing a new process or product for quality and low waste from the start.

A Munger bias: disliking someone makes us overlook their virtues and unfairly judge whatever gets associated with them.

DMAIC is the Six Sigma cycle for process improvement: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.

A Munger tendency: uncertainty is uncomfortable, so the mind rushes to resolve doubt by reaching a decision quickly.

A learning technique of asking yourself "why is this true?" for facts, which builds deeper, longer-lasting understanding.

Manage personal energy, not just time: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy are finite and renewable.

Charlie Munger's Envy/Jealousy Tendency: the drive to resent others' success, which distorts judgment even when it costs you nothing.

Evolution by natural selection: variation, selection, and retention compound over time to produce complex change without central design.

Charlie Munger's Excessive Self-Regard Tendency: the common bias of overvaluing your own abilities, judgments, and possessions.

Karl Popper's criterion for science: a claim only counts as scientific if some possible observation could prove it wrong.

Organizing time and effort around what is genuinely important, not just what feels urgent.

Contributing value to others without demanding an immediate return, so trust and goodwill compound over time.

Choosing the right goal before optimizing strategy, since a good strategy toward the wrong goal is still wasted effort.

The minimum acceptable return a project or investment must clear before it is worth pursuing.

Scoring options on Impact, Confidence, and Ease, and where that sits in a wider decision hierarchy from daily tasks to lifetime choices.

Tracing a problem back to its underlying cause instead of treating the symptom closest to the surface.

The tendency to keep prior conclusions, habits, and commitments even after new evidence undercuts them.

Judging a person, product, or idea by what it is merely linked to, rather than by its own merits.

A Munger bias: people expect fairness to be reciprocated exactly as they define it, and react badly when it is not.

Metacognitive strategies, like retrieval practice, spaced repetition, and chunking, that make learning any skill more effective.

A Munger bias in which liking or loving someone makes us overlook their faults and adopt their views.

Charlie Munger's term for extreme outcomes that appear when several psychological tendencies combine and reinforce each other.

Track the few metrics that truly reflect progress and treat them as signals to act on, not vanity numbers.

Building tools that make it easier to build other tools compounds your capability faster than using tools directly.

A network's value grows roughly with the square of its number of connected users, not linearly with each one added.

Gordon Moore's observation that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years, driving exponential compute growth.

Most significant outcomes result from several factors acting together, not a single isolated cause.

Deliberately investing in relationships before you need them, so information, opportunities, and trust are there when you do.

A single metric or statement chosen to represent the core value a product or team delivers, used to align decisions.

A favorable set of circumstances that only creates value once it is noticed and acted on.

Converting a recognized opportunity into a concrete result through timely, decisive action before it closes.

Deliberately noticing, nurturing, and developing a potential opportunity before it is mature enough to act on.

Charlie Munger's term for the mind's default bias toward overly favorable estimates of outcomes and one's own prospects.

A Munger tendency: the mind unconsciously distorts painful reality to reduce psychological pain, often through denial.

Having independent, qualified peers scrutinize a claim or piece of work before it is accepted or published.

Roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes, so focus effort on the vital few inputs.

Precisely stating what problem you are actually solving before jumping to solutions.

The way a problem is worded quietly limits which solutions people consider.

Writing down problems as they occur, instead of relying on memory, to spot patterns and set priorities.

A general process for moving from a problem to a working solution: define, analyze, generate, act, review.

Voluntarily delaying a task despite expecting the delay to leave you worse off.

Stacking daily tasks on weekly plans, on goals, on values, so day-to-day work ladders up to what actually matters.

A Munger tendency: people comply more readily with a request when given a reason for it, even a weak one.

Aiming for long-term satisfaction

Charlie Munger's observation that incentives shape behavior more powerfully than people expect.

The proximate cause is the last event before an outcome; the root cause is the earlier one worth fixing.

A lightweight agile framework for running product development in fixed-length sprints with defined roles.

The finding that most people in a large network are connected through only a small number of intermediate links.

A checklist for turning a vague goal into one that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

A Munger tendency: stress amplifies other psychological tendencies and can trigger sudden, drastic shifts in behavior.

Breaking a large, complex problem into smaller parts that are each easier to understand and solve.

Contrasting decision styles: stopping at a "good enough" option versus searching for the objectively best one.

Kevin Kelly's term for the self-organizing, interconnected system that all of humanity's technology forms together.

Gary Keller's framework for finding the single highest-leverage action to focus on before anything else.

Tracing a decision's consequences three steps out, beyond the immediate and second-order effects.

The point at which small, incremental changes accumulate enough to trigger a sudden, large-scale shift.

The idea, brand, or option that comes to a person's attention first, without prompting, when a category is mentioned.

A Munger tendency: people feel pressure to speak or answer at length even when they have little of substance to say.

Choosing to show up and be seen with uncertain outcome, which research links to trust, connection, and courage rather than weakness.

A sequential project approach where each phase (requirements, design, build, test, release) finishes before the next begins.

Aggregating many independent, diverse judgments can produce an estimate more accurate than most individual experts.

The limited mental workspace that holds and manipulates a small amount of information for immediate use.