Mental Model
Second Career Planning
With careers spanning 50+ years while company lifespans average 15-20 years, most professionals need at least one major reinvention
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Mental Model
Second-Order Consequence Check Protocol
A structured protocol for systematically thinking beyond first-order effects of a decision to identify the cascading consequences most people miss
Mental Model
Second-Order Thinking
Tracing how an action's immediate consequences create further responses and effects that may change the overall outcome.
Mental Model
Secrets
In Peter Thiel's practitioner framing, secrets are valuable possibilities or truths that are overlooked or not widely accepted
Mental Model
Secular Sacred Framework
The secular sacred framework identifies how non-religious modern life generates experiences, objects, and practices that function as 'sacred' in the sociological sense—set apart from the ordinary, treated with special re…
Cognitive Move
Seed or reset the stock
Make a bounded one-time change to the current level so the system can escape a trap or cross a threshold.
Mental Model
Seed Saving as Knowledge Preservation
Seed saving—collecting, storing, and replanting seeds from one's harvest—is simultaneously a practical skill and a knowledge preservation system stretching back 10,000 years
Cognitive Move
Seed the Flywheel
Subsidize the first few turns, then test whether natural returns can sustain the next turn on their own.
Mental Model
Seeing the Front
The military principle (emphasized by leaders from Napoleon to Rommel) that commanders must personally observe front-line conditions rather than relying solely on reports, data, and subordinate summaries
Mental Model
Seeking the Wrong Goal
A system archetype where the system's stated goal diverges from the goal it's actually optimizing for
Mental Model
Seizing the Middle
The strategic principle of controlling the center position in a competition—physically (in chess or military strategy), conceptually (in framing debates), or commercially (in market positioning)
Cognitive Move
Select Reference Shape
Choose whether success is a point, threshold, band, trajectory, distribution, frontier, policy, or compass.
Mental Model
Selection Bias
The distortion that occurs when the process of selecting a sample systematically excludes certain types of observations—producing a sample that doesn't represent the population
Cognitive Move
Selection or measurement artifact
This rival says the world may not have changed at all, only your view of it. Sampling, visibility, a tool or dashboard setting, how items got coded, or who survived to be counted can manufacture the pattern by itself.
Mental Model
Selective Optimization with Compensation (Baltes)
Paul Baltes' SOC model describes how people maintain effective functioning despite age-related losses through three coordinated strategies: Selection (narrowing goals and domains to focus on what matters most), Optimizat…
Cognitive Move
Self
Your own body and brain carry the work best suited to embodied judgment, values, presence, practice, and final authority.
Mental Model
Self-Accountability
The practice of holding yourself to standards and commitments REGARDLESS of external enforcement—taking ownership of outcomes rather than attributing them to circumstances, others, or luck
Mental Model
Self-Complexity Theory (Linville)
Patricia Linville's self-complexity theory proposes that people vary in how many distinct self-aspects (roles, relationships, activities, traits) they maintain, and that greater self-complexity provides a psychological b…
Mental Model
Self-Confidence
The strategic and psychological resource of CALIBRATED belief in one's own ability to execute, learn, and adapt—distinct from both arrogance (overconfidence disconnected from evidence) and self-doubt (underconfidence dis…
Mental Model
Self-Control
The capacity to override immediate impulses, desires, and emotional reactions in service of longer-term goals—the ability to choose delayed gratification over immediate reward
Mental Model
Self-Deception and Denial
The psychological mechanisms by which people systematically distort their perception of reality to maintain psychological comfort, protect self-image, or avoid painful truths
Mental Model
Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan)
Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Deci and Ryan over four decades, identifies three innate psychological needs predicting intrinsic motivation and wellbeing: autonomy (volitional choice), competence (feeling…
Mental Model
Self-Expansion Theory
Arthur Aron's self-expansion theory proposes that a fundamental human motivation is to grow—to expand the self by acquiring resources, perspectives, and identities