Mental Model
Career Capital Theory (Newport)
Cal Newport argues that 'follow your passion' is dangerously misleading
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Mental Model
Career Conversation with Manager Protocol
A protocol for having productive career development conversations with your manager, distinct from performance reviews
Mental Model
Career Death & Professional Grief
Career death describes the experience when a professional identity—not just a job but an entire career trajectory—becomes unviable
Mental Model
Career Lattice vs. Ladder
The traditional career 'ladder' assumes vertical progression: analyst to manager to director to VP
Mental Model
Career Moat Building
Borrowed from Buffett's 'economic moat' concept, a career moat is a set of durable competitive advantages protecting your position from displacement
Mental Model
Career Optionality
Career optionality applies real options theory from finance to career decisions
Mental Model
Career Pivot Framework
Jenny Blake's framework treats career transitions as systematic experiments grounded in existing strengths
Mental Model
Career Risk Portfolio
Your career contains a mix of risks that can be analyzed and diversified
Mental Model
Cargo cult
In contemporary methodological use, cargo cult refers to copying visible features of a practice while omitting something necessary for it to work
Mental Model
Cargo Cult Management
Adopting the visible practices of successful organizations without understanding the underlying principles that make those practices work
Cognitive Move
Carry
Can you hold the task goal and at least one thing you must protect in mind at the same time?
Mental Model
Carrying Capacity
Carrying capacity describes the population an environment can support under specified conditions
Cognitive Move
cartogram
True area is thrown away and each region is resized by the count that matters, whether that is households or hours or dollars. Shapes distort and stay recognizable enough to find. What was a whisper becomes the biggest shape on the page. You give up any read on real geography, which is exactly the trade you want when land area was never the point.
Cognitive Move
Cartoon
Compresses a judgment into one drawn image with a target, so the verdict lands in a glance and the hedges do not come with it.
Mental Model
Cascading Failure Dynamics (Domino Effect in Systems)
The pattern by which failure in one component propagates through a system, triggering failures in connected components that trigger further failures, producing damage far exceeding the initial fault
Mental Model
Cascading Failures in Networks
Cascading failures propagate when a disruption changes load, dependencies, or responses in ways that cause further failures.
Mental Model
Case Theory Construction
Case theory is the organizing narrative that explains why your client should win — not just legally, but morally and factually
Cognitive Move
case write-up
Fixed sections in a fixed order: the setup, what was tried, what happened, what carried over. The sections cost you flow and buy you stacking. Three write-ups under the same headings can be read down a column instead of end to end, so a reader can find the case whose conditions match theirs rather than trusting that yours generalizes to them.
Mental Model
Catalysts
A catalyst provides a reaction pathway with different kinetic barriers and is regenerated overall
Mental Model
Categorical Imperative (Kant)
Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative provides two tests for moral action: the Universalizability Test ('Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law') an…
Mental Model
Categorical Models
Categorical models organize descriptions or predictions by group membership while allowing meaningful variation within groups.
Cognitive Move
Category to Continuum
Replace a brittle binary label with one or two measurable axes and locate the boundary cases.
Mental Model
Cathedral vs Bazaar (Closed vs Open Development)
Raymond's metaphor contrasts development styles with different degrees of centralized coordination and exposure to distributed participation
Cognitive Move
Causal diagram
Draw the factors as boxes and the influences between them as signed arrows, plus the loops that feed back on themselves and the lags. Use it when you need to know what drives what, and where one small push moves the most.