Conclusion
AS WE SAID IN THE INTRODUCTION, this is the book we wish someone had given us when we were starting out in our careers. That’s because mental models unlock the ability to think at higher levels. We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading about them, and that our book has helped you in your super thinking journey.
Since many of these concepts may be new to you, you will need to practice using them to get the most out of them. As Richard Feynman famously wrote in his 1988 book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
A related mental model is the cargo cult, as explained by Feynman in his 1974 Caltech commencement speech:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Feynman is describing a real group of people in Melanesia and how they acted after coming into contact with more advanced technology. They believed, in a cultish fashion, that imitating what they saw from the technologically advanced people would bring them great wealth, or cargo. However, they didn’t really understand how to behave in a way to get the results they wanted. They thought that if they built the runway just right, that would mean the planes would automatically start arriving with free goods. Of course, that didn’t happen, because they didn’t really understand what was attracting the planes in the first place, let alone the actual technologies needed to allow them to land safely.
When people don’t really understand what they’re doing, they are cargo cultists, unlikely to get the results that they seek. For example, cargo-cult entrepreneurs might constantly go to startup networking events, but never actually build a viable company. Cargo-cult science appears to be a scientific endeavor, but it does not rigorously follow the scientific method (see Chapter 4). Cargo-cult investors might try to copy what they see others investing in, but they do not understand the reasons behind the investments, and so their investments don’t perform as well in the long run.
You don’t want to be a cargo-cult super thinker, using mental models without really understanding them, and therefore not getting their benefits. For example, you don’t want to use the wrong ones for a given situation or take away the wrong messages. To avoid these traps, you need to think deeply about whether and how a given mental model applies to a situation. We have a couple of steps for you to take in order to do so and ensure that you become a real super thinker.
First, get a partner in super thinking. Thinking about complicated topics in isolation does not yield the best results. It’s much better to share your ideas with someone and get their feedback. It doesn’t have to be the same person for all topics. You could talk to one person for political topics, someone else for economic topics, etc. But talking to people who are interested in the core truth of a particular subject is essential.
Second, try writing. Even if you never publish anything, the act of writing clarifies your thinking and makes you aware of holes in your arguments. You can combine writing and finding a partner by participating in an online forum or blog where the complex topics that interest you are discussed and analyzed.
Over time, your efforts will expand what Warren Buffett calls your circle of competence. The inside of the circle covers areas where you have knowledge or experience—where you are competent—and in those areas, you can think effectively. In areas outside the circle, you cannot. The most dangerous zone is just outside your circle of competence, where you might think you are competent but you really are not. Buffett wrote in a 1999 shareholder letter:
If we have a strength, it is in recognizing when we are operating well within our circle of competence and when we are approaching the perimeter. . . .
Anywhere in life, your success rate will drop if you operate out of your circle of competence. You can suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect (see Chapter 8), where you make mistakes because you don’t know what you don’t know. For example, you can fail to recognize or misapply design patterns (see Chapter 3). You also may apply the few techniques you know well to try to solve all your problems, inevitably in suboptimal ways (see Maslow’s hammer in Chapter 6).
Circle of Competence
The good news is that the mental models in this book will expand your circle of competence. Interacting with people who already know how to successfully apply them can help you correct your mistakes and expand your circle even faster. With that in mind, we feel it is apt to conclude with a couple more quotes from Charlie Munger. Our super thinking journey began after we heard his speech, and we hope he can offer the same inspiration to you. The first is from Poor Charlie’s Almanack, the second from a May 2007 commencement speech at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law:
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject area) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren [Buffett] reads—and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.
Since the really big ideas carry 95% of the freight, it wasn’t at all hard for me to pick up all the big ideas in all the disciplines and make them a standard part of my mental routines. Once you have the ideas, of course, they’re no good if you don’t practice. If you don’t practice, you lose it. So I went through life constantly practicing this multidisciplinary approach.
Well, I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun. It’s made me more constructive. It’s made me more helpful to others. It’s made me enormously rich. You name it. That attitude really helps.
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU TO OUR KIDS, Eli and Ryan, for bearing with us while we were writing this book. Thank you to Michael Zakhar and Stephen Hanselman, as well as everyone else at Portfolio and Penguin for editing support, especially Vivian Roberson, Leah Trouwborst, and Kaushik Viswanath. Thank you to Madé Dimas Wirawan for his illustrations.
Image Credits
1: Adapted from The Avengers, dir. Joss Whedon (Marvel Studios, 2012).
2: Adapted from Apollo 13, dir. Ron Howard (Imagine Entertainment, 1995).
3: Based on a meme from “What is the next step with our MVP?” Gerry Claps, Quora, September 10, 2015, www.quora.com/what-is-the-next-step-with-our-mvp.
4: Adapted from Creative Commons image: Ghiles, “Somewhat noisy linear data fit to both a linear function and to a polynomial of 10 degrees,” Wikimedia Commons, March 11, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Overfitted_Data.png.
5: Cartoon by Wiley Miller.
6: Headlines from August 31, 2015, on foxnews.com and cnn.com. Both early headlines have since been altered, though the final stories from the following day are still available: “Atlanta-Area Police Officer Shot after Responding to Wrong Home,” Fox News, September 1, 2015, www.foxnews.com/us/atlanta-area-police-officer-shot-after-responding-to-wrong-home; Eliott C. McLaughlin and Holly Yan, “Police: Friendly Fire Likely Wounded Officer in Wrong-House Encounter,” CNN, September 1, 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/09/01/us/georgia-wrong-house-shooting/index.html.
7: Adaped from Texas Roadhouse menu, http://restaurantfood.menu/menu/image/allbrandlogo/Texas%20Roadhouse.jpg.
8: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as cited by Christopher Ingraham, “There’s No Immigration Crisis, and These Charts Prove It,” Washington Post, June 21, 201
8, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/21/theres-no-immigration-crisis-and-these-charts-prove-it.
9: Justin McCarthy, “Most Americans Still See Crime Up Over Last Year,” Gallup, November 21, 2014.
10: Sarah Lichtenstein et al., “Judged Frequency of Lethal Events,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 4, no. 6 (November 1978).
11: DuckDuckGo, “There are no ‘regular results’ on Google anymore,” October 10, 2012, Vimeo video, 1:21, https://vimeo.com/51181384.
12: Adapted from “Addition using number bonds,” OnlineMathLearning.com, www.onlinemathlearning.com/addition-number-bonds.html.
13: Adapted from a map by the U.S. Geological Survey, May 5, 1999, https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/continents.html.
14: Claude Allègre, The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility, trans. Deborah Kurmes Van Dam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 7.
15: Cartoon by Clive Goddard.
16: Meme adapted from https://78.media.tumblr.com/7f4ed380aadc01351b024959008f6e02/tumblr_mg3mhsUlOz1rhf11xo1_500.png.
16 and 17: Cartoons by Betsy Streeter.
18: Sandra W. Roush et al., “Historical Comparisons of Morbidity and Mortality for Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in the United States,” Journal of the American Medical Association 298, no. 18 (November 14, 2007).
19: Environmental Defense Fund, “How Cap and Trade Works,” January 7, 2009, YouTube video, 1:13, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKT_ac4LPkU.
20, 21, 22, and 20: Cartoons by Harley Schwadron.
21: © 2002 Kenneth and Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org.
22: Jonathon W. Penney, “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 31, no. 1 (September 8, 2016): 148.
23: Cartoon by Greg Perry.
24: Based on a meme tweeted by Kristian Hellang, “Just tried to explain technical debt to a customer, had to pull this out again . . . ,” Twitter, July 30, 2015, 4:29 A.M., https://twitter.com/khellang/status/626716128379830273.
28, 29, and 25: Cartoons by Tom Fishburne.
26: Cartoon by Mark Godfrey.
27: Adapted from Craig Brown, “The Little Dipper and the Earth’s Tilt and Rotation,” Craig’s Sense of Wonder: Into a Curious Mind, November 17, 2012, https://craigssenseofwonder.wordpress.com/tag/insolation.
28: Adapted from Creative Commons image: Ashley Dace, “Star Trail above Beccles, near to Gillingham, Norfolk, Great Britain,” Wikimedia Commons, May 13, 2010, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Star_Trail_above_Beccles_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1855505.jpg.
29: Cartoon by Roy Delgado.
30: Adapted from U.S. Congressional Budget Office, “The Federal Budget in 2015,” infographic, January 6, 2016, www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs-images/50xxx/51110-Land_Overall.png.
31: Adapted from National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, “Concentration of Health Spending Among Highest Spenders,” infographic, 2013.
32: Angela Liao, “A Field Guide to Procrastinators,” Twenty Pixels, September 6, 2013, www.20px.com/blog/2013/09/06/a-field-guide-to-procrastinators.
33: Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, “Do Defaults Save Lives?” Science 302, no. 5649 (November 21, 2003).
34: Cartoon by Mike Shapiro.
35: The Argyle Sweater © 2010 Scott Hilburn. Dist. by Andrews McMeel Syndication. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
36: Adapted from Creative Commons image: Martinowsky and Chiswick Chap, “Natural selection in action: light and dark morphs of the peppered moth, Biston betularia,” Wikimedia Commons, February 18, 2007, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lichte_en_zwarte_versie_berkenspanner_crop.jpg.
37: Cartoon by Larry Lambert.
38: “Inertia - Demotivational Poster,” Fake Posters, July 22, 2009, www.fakeposters.com/posters/inertia.
39: Communic@tions Management Inc., “Sixty Years of Daily Newspaper Circulation: Canada, United States, United Kingdom,” (May 6, 2011), http://media-cmi.com/downloads/Sixty_Years_Daily_Newspaper_Circulation_Trends_050611.pdf.
40: Adapted from a Creative Commons image. Birmingham Museums Trust, “Richard Trevithick’s 1802 steam locomotive,” Wikimedia Commons, August 11, 2005, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel#/media/File:Thinktank_Birmingham_-_Trevithick_Locomotive(1).jpg.
41: Adapted from public domain image. Damian Yerrick, “Illustration of a roly-poly toy viewed from the side. The red and white bullseye represents the figurine’s center of mass (COM).” Wikimedia Commons, August 15, 2009, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poli_Gus_N_rocked.svg.
42: “How does a Nuclear Bomb work?” Figure 1: The Nuclear Fission Chain Reaction, guernseyDonkey.com, February 24, 2012.
43: Peter Leyden, “Historical Adoption Rates of Communication Technologies,” infographic.
44: Justin McCarthy, “Record-High 60% of Americans Support Same-Sex Marriage,” Gallup (May 19, 2015).
45: Adapted from a Creative Commons image. Woody993, “Diagram showing the network effect in a few simple phone networks,” Wikimedia Commons, May 31, 2011, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe’s_law#/media/File:Metcalfe-Network-Effect.svg [inactive].
46: J. L. Westover, “The Butterfly Effect,” Mr. Lovenstein, https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/50.
52 and 47: Cartoons by Theresa McCracken.
48: Randall Munroe, “Fuck Grapefruit,” XKCD, https://xkcd.com/388.
49: Cartoon by Bradford Veley.
50: Adapted from Raiders of the Lost Ark, dir. Steven Spielberg (Lucasfilm Ltd., 1981).
51: Adapted from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, dir. Mel Stuart (Wolper Pictures Ltd., 1971).
52: Randall Munroe, “Correlation,” XKCD, https://xkcd.com/552.
53: Creative Commons license. Tyler Vigen, “Spurious Correlations,” www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations.
54: Cartoon by Fran.
55: Dilbert © 2001 Scott Adams. Used by permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
56: Adapted from a Creative Commons image. McGeddon, “Illustration of hypothetical damage pattern on a WW2 bomber,” Wikimedia Commons, November 12, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.png.
57: Cartoon by Nate Fakes.
58: Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking Books, 2011).
59: Philip A. Mackowiak, Steven S. Wasserman, and Myron M. Levine, “A Critical Appraisal of 98.6°F, the Upper Limit of the Normal Body Temperature, and Other Legacies of Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich,” Journal of the American Medical Association 268, no. 12 (September 1992), 1578–80.
60: U.S. Census Bureau, “HINC-06. Income Distribution to $250,000 or More for Households,” www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-hinc/hinc-06.2016.html.
61: Center for Disease Control, “Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults: United States, 2011–2014,” Vital and Health Statistics series 3, no. 39 (August 2016).
62: Common Probability Distributions, Cloudera Engineering Blog, Sean Owen, December 3, 2015.
63: Mark L. Berenson, David M. Levine, and Timothy C. Krehbiel, Basic Business Statistics: Concepts and Applications (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2006).
64: Randall Munroe, “Significant,” XKCD, https://xkcd.com/882.
71 and 65: Cartoons by Aaron Bacall.
73 and 66: Cartoons by Shaun McCallig.
67: Cartoon by Mike Baldwin.
68: Adapted from Shivshanker Singh Patel, “local optimal success{ordinals of life 2.0},” Destiny exiles me, May 16, 2013, http://destinyexilesme.blogspot.com/2013/05/local-optimal-sucessordinals-of-life-20.html.
69: Adapted from a Creative Commons image: Dhatfield, “Diagram of Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment,” Wikimedia Commons, June 26, 2008, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schrodingers_cat.svg.
70: Cartoon by Joseph Farris.
71: Georg
etown University Center on Education and the Workforce, as cited in Debra Humphreys and Anthony Carnevale, “The Economic Value of Liberal Education,” slideshow, 2013, www.slideshare.net/aacu_/the-economic-value-of-liberal-education.
72: Adapted from James M. Kilts, “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades,” The Onion, February 18, 2004, www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036.
73: Adapted from Joshua L. Kalla and David E. Broockman, “Campaign Contributions Facilitate Access to Congressional Officials: A Randomized Field Experiment,” American Journal of Political Science 60, no. 3 (July 2016).
74: Sacred Heart University, “SHU Just the Facts,” Facebook page, www.facebook.com/shujustthefacts.
75: Adapted from a Creative Commons image. Nyenyec, “Illustration of domino theory (20th century foreign policy theory, promoted by the government of the United States),” Wikimedia Commons, November 10, 2010, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Domino_theory.svg.
76: Adapted from Jeff Wysaki, Pleated Jeans, http://sanctuarycounseling.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/977fcc90fb0909b04e1a594d8142045f.jpg.
77: Cartoon by Andrew Toos.
78: Cartoon by Will Dawbarn.
79: Based on the theory of deliberate practice, as presented by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak (New York: Eamon Dolan Books, 2017).
80: Kim Scott, “What is Radical Candor?” www.radicalcandor.com/about-radical-candor [inactive].
81: Jessica Hagy, “Two annoying problems,” Indexed (blog), May 9, 2012, thisisindexed.com/2012/05/two-annoying-problems.
82: Adapted from Katie Stouffs Grimes, “High and Low Context Cultures - Developing Cultural Fluency,” National Association of Realtors, January 26, 2015, http://theglobalview.blogs.realtor.org/2015/01/26/high-and-low-context-cultures-developing-cultural-fluency [inactive].
83: Dilbert © 2012 Scott Adams. Used by permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
84: Cartoon by John McPherson.
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