Find a thinking move to make, or a mental model to understand a situation.
Failure Patterns & Anti-Models
The failure pattern where the standard required to begin or complete work exceeds what's achievable, resulting in chronic non-completion, procrastination, or never starting
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Martin Seligman's original finding—that organisms exposed to inescapable adverse conditions stop trying even when escape becomes possible—extended to its subtle manifestations in modern life
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
When legitimate suffering calcifies into a permanent identity that, paradoxically, prevents healing and growth
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern of deriving identity and worth from rescuing others, which creates dependency rather than empowerment and ultimately serves the rescuer's needs more than the rescued
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The systematic failure to account for existing commitments when accepting new ones, resulting in perpetual overwhelm that is self-inflicted but feels externally imposed
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern of perpetually postponing meaningful life experiences until some future condition is met, where the condition keeps receding
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
When a person reduces their life's success to a single measure—net worth, body weight, follower count, GPA, publication count—and optimizes ruthlessly for it at the expense of everything unmeasured
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Tal Ben-Shahar's term for the illusion that reaching a major goal will produce lasting happiness, followed by the disorienting emptiness when it doesn't
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Christina Maslach's research reveals burnout not as a single event but as a self-reinforcing spiral with three interacting components: emotional exhaustion (depleted energy), depersonalization (cynicism and detachment fr…
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The progressive hardening of the comfort zone boundary until it becomes a prison rather than a base
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
When achievement becomes so central to self-concept that the person can no longer take risks, show vulnerability, or learn from failure because any setback threatens their core identity
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Beyond the basic concept of feeling like a fraud despite evidence of competence, the spiral model maps how imposter syndrome creates a self-reinforcing cycle that worsens over time: (1) initial success is attributed to l…
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
John Gottman's research identifies contempt—the expression of superiority and disgust toward a partner—as the single most reliable predictor of relationship dissolution, with 93% accuracy
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The most common destructive interaction cycle in intimate relationships: one partner demands change, engagement, or emotional connection while the other withdraws, avoids, or shuts down
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Emotional and communicative shutdown during conflict—going blank, refusing to engage, leaving the room, or giving monosyllabic non-responses
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Jennifer Freyd's framework for understanding how betrayal by someone you depend on creates a uniquely destructive form of trauma that is self-perpetuating
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
A relational pattern where one person's excessive focus on another's needs, feelings, and problems becomes a substitute for addressing their own, creating a dysfunctional equilibrium that serves both parties' avoidance n…
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Salvador Minuchin's family therapy concept describing relationships where boundaries between individuals are so blurred that they lose separate identity, autonomy, and the capacity for independent functioning
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The failure pattern where two-person conflicts are managed by involving a third party, which reduces immediate tension but prevents resolution and corrupts three relationships simultaneously
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
A broader version of demand-withdraw that operates not just during conflict but as a chronic relational posture
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
When emotional withdrawal is deployed not as a flooding response (which is involuntary) but as a deliberate punishment or control mechanism
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
A manipulation pattern where one person systematically denies, distorts, or contradicts the other's perception of reality until the target doubts their own memory, judgment, and sanity
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The failure pattern where relationship contributions are tracked like a ledger, with each partner monitoring who has done more, given more, or sacrificed more, leading to chronic resentment and transactional dynamics tha…
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Susan Forward's framework for understanding the manipulation pattern where someone uses fear, obligation, and guilt (FOG) to control another's behavior
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The paradoxical pattern where avoiding conflict to preserve harmony actually destroys the relationship
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern where small boundary violations, when tolerated, create a permission structure for progressively larger violations
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The most addictive relationship pattern, based on the same mechanism that makes slot machines compelling: unpredictable alternation between reward and punishment
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
When adult relationships (romantic, professional, friendships) unconsciously replicate parent-child power dynamics rather than operating as peer-to-peer exchanges
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Arlie Hochschild's concept of emotional labor—managing feelings as part of work—extended to intimate relationships where one partner bears the disproportionate burden of the relationship's emotional maintenance: remember…
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The gradual destruction of trust not through dramatic betrayal but through an accumulation of small violations: broken small promises, shared confidences, subtle lies, forgotten commitments, and inconsistencies between w…
Relationship Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Barry Staw's research on why decision-makers increase investment in failing courses of action rather than cutting losses
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The tendency to stop searching for answers once a satisfying explanation is found, even when further investigation would reveal better explanations or critical nuances
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Irving Janis's original groupthink model focused on cohesive groups making catastrophic decisions through self-censorship and illusion of unanimity
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Roy Baumeister's research showing that decision quality deteriorates predictably as the number of decisions increases, with each decision depleting a finite cognitive resource
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The counterintuitive failure where more information produces worse decisions rather than better ones
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The systematic tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share your beliefs, preferences, and behaviors
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The anchoring bias applied specifically to consequential decisions where the first number, frame, or reference point encountered disproportionately influences the final judgment, even when the anchor is arbitrary or deli…
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The tendency to make decisions in isolation rather than as part of a broader portfolio, leading to excessive risk aversion for individual decisions that would be perfectly reasonable in aggregate
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Judging decisions by their results rather than by the quality of the decision process at the time it was made
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Roger Buehler's extended research on the planning fallacy shows it's not just optimism about time—it's a systematic failure to use base rates for comparable past projects, combined with a focus on the specifics of the cu…
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The systematic error of overvaluing differences between options when comparing them side-by-side, which leads to choosing options whose advantages are noticeable during comparison but imperceptible during actual use
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The self-reinforcing process by which desired conclusions shape the reasoning that's supposed to evaluate them
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The systematic preference for non-decision over decision, driven by the asymmetric psychological cost of commission (doing something wrong) versus omission (failing to do something right)
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Barry Schwartz's 'Paradox of Choice' applied as a failure pattern: as the number of options increases, decision quality and satisfaction both decrease
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The failure of making decisions at too high a level of abstraction, where everything sounds good in theory but fails in practice because critical implementation details are never addressed
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The opposite failure of the abstraction trap: making decisions at too concrete a level, where focus on specific details prevents seeing the larger pattern, strategic context, or systemic implications
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Philip Tetlock's landmark research on expert prediction reveals that domain experts are no better than chance at forecasting outcomes in their own field—and worse, they're more confident in their wrong predictions than n…
Decision Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The failure pattern where consensus-seeking produces decisions that no one actually supports—watered-down compromises that incorporate enough of everyone's preferences to be collectively acceptable but individually unins…
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