Shane Parrish - The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

Education doesnt prepare you for the real world. At least, it didnt prepare me. I was two weeks into my job at an intelligence agency on September 11, 2001 when the world suddenly changed. The job I had been hired to do was no longer the one that was needed. I had a computer science degree; I came from a world of 1s and 0s, not people, families, and interpersonal dynamics. I was thrust into a series of promotions for which I had received no guidance, that came with responsibilities I had no idea how to navigate. Now I found that my decisions affected not only my employees but their families. Not only my country, but other countries. The only problem? I had no idea how to make decisions. I only knew I had an obligation to make the best decisions I could.

To improve my ability to make decisions, I looked around and found some mentors. I watched them carefully and learned from them. I read everything I could about making decisions. I even took some time off work to go back to school and earn my MBA, hoping that I would finally learn how to make better decisions, as if that was some end state rather than a constantly evolving journey.

My belief that the MBA program was a good use of my time was eroded fairly quickly. When I showed up to write an exam only to find out it was an open book test, I realized my expectations were entirely wrong and in need of updating. Was I in a masters program or grade school? Some days, I couldnt tell. And yet that is where everything changed for me.

I realized that I couldnt fail as long as I knew where the answers were in the books I could bring to the exams. This was actually quite liberating. I stopped putting effort into my assignments and started learning about someone who was casually mentioned in class. That person was Charlie Munger. I went from theoretical examples that were completely divorced from the real world, to the wisdom behind the achievements of one of the most successful businessmen of all time. Munger, who you will come to know in these volumes, is the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. Hes easy to like: intelligent, witty, and irreverent. Finding Munger opened the door to unexpected intellectual pleasure. I felt like I had finally found knowledge that was useful because it was gained from someones real effort to better understand how the world works. It was so much more satisfying to learn from someone who had tried to put many theories into practice and was willing to share his results. The fact that Munger was so professionally successful made it all the more compelling.

Munger has a way of thinking through problems using what he calls a broad latticework of mental models. These are chunks of knowledge from different disciplines that can be simplified and applied to better understand the world. The way he describes it, they help identify what information is relevant in any given situation, and the most reasonable parameters to work in. His track record shows that this doesnt just make sense in theory but is devastatingly useful in practice. I started writing about my learnings, the result being the website fs.blog. The last eight years of my life have been devoted to identifying and learning the mental models that have the greatest positive impact, and trying to understand how we think, how we update, how we learn, and how we can make better decisions.