Let’s start with a visualization:
It’s your first day at work and you have reached the office early. You haven’t made any friends at work yet and are waiting in the lobby for orientation to start. Right there, you find a magnificent pen on the floor. Even though the thought of keeping it crosses your mind, you make the honest choice of taking it to the reception.
As you are telling the receptionist where you found this expensive-looking pen another person pats your shoulder and says, “Thanks a lot! This is my lucky pen and I’ve been looking for it the whole morning.” You turn to your side to find the CEO of the company smiling at you.
Make sure you imagine the whole thing vividly, especially the pen, the receptionist, and the CEO.
Done?
Ok, question time:
What was the gender of the CEO?
What was the gender of the receptionist?
Most people imagine a male CEO and a female receptionist. But why?
Bias.
While this was imaginary, such biases have caused a lot more harm in the real world than you can imagine, like selection processes where judges unconsciously end up selecting male candidates over females. Let’s dive deeper.
Blinded by Bias
In previous missions, we have already come across complexity bias and negativity bias and seen how they can help as well as harm us. In general, biases save our energy and time by fast-forwarding us through an enormous amount of information using familiar patterns learned from past experiences. But this automation comes at the cost of overlooking new information.
In the example above, if you visualized the CEO as a male, then it is so because your brain has been trained to see a lot more male CEOs than others. We favor the familiar unconsciously. And there is nothing wrong with it, as long as you are willing to accept new information. You need to be a continuous learner.
But in a world where change is the only constant, what was true yesterday might not be valid today. Known facts are superseded or proven untrue by new information every day. On top of this, noise is added to the truth as information passes from one person to another, because each mind operates with different motives, and sees the world from its biased perspective. For example, a supporter of communism might overweigh the negatives of democracy.
Thus, to stay relevant and correct, not only do you need to learn the new, and challenge the old, but also stay aware of the motives and propaganda driving your information sources. Overwhelming, right? Don’t worry, the solution already exists: Move away from evaluating with information and instead seek “mental models” (or frameworks).
Open Your Eyes
To rely solely on what we know is like operating with one eye closed. It is impossible to see the full picture. As Morgan Housel noted, “Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what's happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. We're all biased to our own personal history.”
On the other hand, using a mental model is like opening the second eye as well, improving our vision with a holistic view of the situation. In fact, by the same analogy, we can say that mental models often augment our vision with a microscope and telescope as well.
A mental model is a fundamental concept of how something works in a domain. And the best mental models apply to broad aspects of daily life, from economics to physics, and philosophy to biology. The best part is you can carry these small nuggets in mind to help you understand the relationship between things and understand the world better.
Remember, all perspectives, including your personal experience, hold some truth, but none of them convey the complete truth. And the more perspectives you can use to illuminate a subject, the easier it gets to see the whole truth and make better decisions.
To maximize our chances of survival, the brain is constantly trying to understand the situations we find ourselves in. And it does so quickly, filling up every gap in knowledge based on what we already know. This is our mind reacting, jumping to conclusions based on assumptions.
But to operate with mental models is to respond. We slow down, open the other eye as well or pull up a telescope to see the bigger picture. A mental model helps us ask the right questions and process the information to squeeze more sense out of it.
Now that we have discussed enough about utility of multiple perspectives and how mental models can help us, let us take our first step with a mental model that has been around for centuries: Inversion.
Mental Model #1: Inversion
The idea is simple: Think the opposite. To do good, avoid doing the bad.
If you have already been to the Tree of Life – Level 3, you know this mental model as Negative Visualization. The idea remains the same. The Stoics believed that to live a good life, you should visualize what could go wrong. Preparing in advance not only makes dealing with negative events easier but also motivates you to live well, forever grateful for what could have gone wrong but did not.
For example, if you want to want to excel in an exam, the forward way of thinking is to study regularly, but how many succeed this way? Instead, using inversion can help you prepare even better. With this, you plan against the common pitfalls, like laziness, distractions, and procrastination.
Let’s see how you can apply inversion to other life aspects.
Personal finance
To improve your financial situation, ask yourself: “what actions will destroy my wealth?” The answers may emerge as impulsive shopping, paying a premium for luxuries, accumulating debt, eating out frequently, or partying too much.
Inverting can help stop leakages in your wealth, aiding the same goal.
Relationships
To improve your relationships, ask yourself: “what actions will ruin my relationship?” Not giving freedom to the other person, lack of trust, overreacting to small mistakes, not understanding their problems, or not respecting them.
While chasing an ideal relationship could have seemed taxing, inversion helps you get closer to your goal by avoiding the common traps. Great results for a fraction of effort 😊
Productivity
To get more done, ask: “what will kill my focus or distract me?” The answers can vary from watching TV incessantly to a phone always buzzing with notifications. Using a custom Ulysses Contract can help you get rid of these easily without the pressure of trying new productivity hacks.
Just taking care of these negative influences will benefit you greatly. Remember, most of the problem is solved by asking the right questions itself, not running after the right answer.
Now that we’ve explored the need and benefits of mental models, it is time to integrate them into life. Let’s start with inversion and add more as they come in the Kompasses.