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People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.

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Mental Model

Resignation Conversation Script

A protocol for resigning professionally, preserving relationships, and navigating the emotional complexity of leaving

Mental Model

Resilience

The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, reorganize, and maintain its essential functions—distinct from robustness (resisting change) and distinct from efficiency (optimizing for known conditions)

Mental Model

Resistance as Communication

In clinical practice, 'resistance' refers to any behavior that seems to work against the therapeutic process: missing sessions, arriving late, changing the subject when approaching difficult material, intellectualizing e…

Cognitive Move

Resize

When your problem feels stuck, change the size of the thing you're looking at by running six zoom lenses (Structure, Cycle, Actor, Link, Ensemble, Service) until a unit appears that you can actually control.

Cognitive Move

Resolve Tradeoffs

Choose a legitimate rule, like priority order or floors-then-optimize, for objectives that can't all be maximized.

Mental Model

Resonance (When Small Inputs Produce Large Outputs)

The physics phenomenon where a small, periodic input at just the right frequency produces a disproportionately large response—a child's well-timed pushes on a swing produce huge arcs, and soldiers breaking step on bridge…

Cognitive Move

Resource

Some better options only open once you own a durable asset: equipment, capital, software, a dataset, or a body of published work. Unlike a skill or a contact, this one is a thing you hold and can point at.

Cognitive Move

Resource mix

Swap what you spend. Every plan runs on some blend of money, time, people, tools, and attention. Trade one input for another that you actually have more of, keeping the goal and often the method the same.

Cognitive Move

resource or incremental game

A fixed quantity drains as you play and does not refill. Each turn you choose where it goes, and what it buys arrives a turn or two later. The structure being carried is accumulation with a delay, and the only way to meet a delay is to live through one.

Cognitive Move

Resources

List the finite inputs you have to spend: hours, money, energy, attention, help, equipment. These are budgets, not thresholds. Unlike a hard constraint you must never cross, a resource sets how much you can buy of anything.

Mental Model

Respeto (Hierarchical Respect)

Respeto is the Latin American value system of deference and consideration structured along clear hierarchical lines -- age, gender, social position, professional status, and family role

Cognitive Move

Response and escalation rule

Decide now what happens the moment the warning signal trips, and who gets told. Name the action, who takes it, and whether anyone can override. The signal only helps if a pre-agreed response is attached to it.

Mental Model

Response Bias

Systematic distortions in how people respond to surveys, interviews, or research questions—producing data that reflects the measurement process rather than the true state of affairs

Mental Model

Responsive vs. Spontaneous Desire (Nagoski)

Emily Nagoski's framework from 'Come As You Are' distinguishing two types of sexual desire: SPONTANEOUS desire (arousal appears seemingly out of nowhere—'I suddenly want sex') and RESPONSIVE desire (arousal emerges IN RE…

Mental Model

Rest Ethic vs. Work Ethic

Western culture has a deeply developed work ethic—a moral framework valorizing effort, productivity, and busyness—but lacks a corresponding rest ethic: a moral framework treating recovery and disengagement as equally vir…

Cognitive Move

Restate

Before touching the work, say in one sentence what the job actually is and which outcome must survive the return. Two things, not one: the task, and the thing you refuse to break while doing it. Everything downstream gets sized against that sentence.

Mental Model

Restorative Justice Model

Restorative justice shifts the focus of conflict resolution from punishment (What rule was broken? Who is to blame? What punishment do they deserve?) to repair (Who was harmed? What are their needs? Whose obligation is i…

Cognitive Move

Restore the Base

When an ordinary physical need or established care step is the real limiter, take that direct action instead of trying another mental technique.

Cognitive Move

Result

Before you look, name every reading the probe could come back with, and put numbers on the cut points: what counts as a hit, what counts as a miss, and which middle band means the test settled nothing.

Cognitive Move

Result Signal

Pick a lagging observation close to the real outcome that would prove the value actually changed.

Cognitive Move

Result-to-route map

Decide before looking what you'll do for a supportive, contrary, mixed, invalid, or ambiguous result.

Mental Model

Resulting (Judging Decisions by Outcomes)

Annie Duke's term for the pervasive error of evaluating decisions by their outcomes rather than by the quality of the decision process given what was known at the time