People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
Keep a loop that works and change what it aims at. The machinery is fine; the target, scoreboard, reward, or boundary it serves is wrong. You retarget rather than cut, strengthen, or stabilize. If nobody agrees what the right target is, settle that first.
Asks who actually captures the value the mechanism produces, not who operates it. Follow the output downstream to whoever ends up better off. Naming that party exposes who will defend the current setup and who quietly depends on it.
Name who is actually better off, then describe the changed condition in words an outsider could see or hear. Not what you will do, but what will be true, specific enough that someone else could confirm it.
Name what each party actually gains, stated in that party's own terms rather than yours. Be concrete: the specific thing they get, not a general "this helps them." Gains one person values may mean nothing to another in the same room.
The counterintuitive finding that doing a favor for someone INCREASES your liking of them—the opposite of what intuition suggests
Measure the result against the ceiling: the strongest outcome physically possible given your constraints, talent, and time. This contrast ignores what is typical or what you did before, and reports only the size of the remaining gap.
Find the cheapest real-world observation where your leading options would predict different results.
Jennifer Freyd's framework for understanding how betrayal by someone you depend on creates a uniquely destructive form of trauma that is self-perpetuating
Ask whether the named operation becomes easier or more reliable and whether a justified output changes. A prettier explanation with the same prediction, comparison, test, decision, or action does not pass.
Annie Duke's technique of forcing yourself to express beliefs as probabilities or wager amounts rather than verbal labels like 'I think' or 'probably.' When you say 'I'd bet $100 at 3:1 odds that...,' you're forced to ca…
The prime-mammal warning questions the assumption that gradual evolutionary change requires a sharply transformed first member with a new essence
Charlie Munger's emphasis on perhaps the most powerful psychological force: people's behavior is overwhelmingly shaped by their incentive structure, often in ways they themselves don't recognize
A fundamental concept from machine learning that generalizes to all prediction and modeling: bias (systematic error from oversimplified assumptions) and variance (error from oversensitivity to specific data) are in tensi…
Your predictions or thresholds quietly shifted after you saw the result, which corrupts the update.
John Gottman's research revealed that relationships are built or eroded through thousands of small moments he calls 'bids for connection' — any attempt to get attention, affirmation, affection, or engagement from another…
Bids are small invitations for connection
An algorithm that finds a target in a sorted dataset by repeatedly halving the search space—checking the middle element and eliminating the irrelevant half
Natural soundscapes—birdsong, flowing water, wind through leaves, insect choruses—have measurable restorative effects distinct from visual nature exposure
Wilson's biophilia hypothesis proposes an evolved human tendency to attend to and affiliate with living systems
Biophilic design integrates natural elements into built environments for measurable health and cognitive benefits
The birth lottery highlights unchosen starting conditions that shape opportunities and outcomes
Koestler's bisociation describes bringing normally separate frames of reference into relation so that a situation or idea is understood through both