Shane Parrish Quotes

I would get to work and rather than write the report, which was clearly the most important thing for me to do, I’d check my email. If there was anything in my inbox that required even a modicum of attention, I’d tell myself I needed to do that before starting on the report. And, of course, by the time I was done with that first email, more had come in that needed attention. It didn’t take much to convince myself I needed to do that before I started. Only near the end of the workday would I finally sit down to write the report, mentally exhausted. When you step back and think about it for a second, I was giving one of the most important things I wanted to do the worst of myself. Email, which I dread on the best of days, was getting my most energetic and creative self. Many of us do this with our partners too. By the time everything we need to do over the course of a long day is finished, we’re exhausted. And this is the time we give to our spouse, the most important person in our lives!

As more and more people know what model you’re using to manipulate them, they may decide not to respond to your incentives. As your competitors gain knowledge of the model, they respond in kind by adopting the model themselves, thus flattening the field. The model may have been mostly useful in a factory setting, and not in an office setting, or a technology setting. Human beings are not simple automatons: A more complete model would hone in on other motivations they

However, not every model is as reliable as gravity, and all models are flawed in some way.

We run into problems when our knowledge becomes of the map, rather than the actual underlying territory it describes.

borders tend to be places of exchange

Education doesn’t prepare you for the real world.

Rich people have money. Wealthy people have time.

Learning comes when experience meets reflection.

must avoid losing before they can win.

So much advantage in life comes from being willing to look like an idiot over the short term.

Just because something happened that was outside of your control doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility to deal with it

Action creates its own confidence.

In life and business, the person with the fewest blind spots wins. Removing blind spots means we see, interact with, and move closer to understanding reality. We think better. And thinking better is about finding simple processes that help us work through problems from multiple dimensions and perspectives, allowing us to better choose solutions that fit what matters to us. The skill for finding the right solutions for the right problems is one form of wisdom.

Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure.

We also tend to undervalue the elementary ideas and overvalue the complicated ones. Most of us get jobs based on some form of specialized knowledge, so this makes sense. We don’t think we have much value if we know the things everyone else does, so we focus our effort on developing unique expertise to set ourselves apart. The problem is then that we reject the simple to make sure what we offer can’t be contributed by someone else. But simple ideas are of great value because they can help us prevent complex problems.

In identifying the Great Mental Models we have looked for elementary principles, the ideas from multiple disciplines that form a time-tested foundation. It may seem counterintuitive, to work on developing knowledge that is available to everyone, but the universe works in the same way no matter where you are in it. What you need is to understand the principles, so that when the details change you are still able to identify what is really going on. This is part of what makes the Great Mental Models so valuable — understanding the principles, you can easily change tactics to apply the ones you need.