Mental Model
Fee Drag Awareness
Fee drag is the cumulative impact of investment fees (expense ratios, advisory fees, trading costs) on long-term wealth
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Mental Model
Fee Drag Blindness
The failure to recognize how seemingly small recurring fees compound into enormous wealth destruction over time
Cognitive Move
Feedback and accumulation
Draws the circle instead of the line: what feeds back into its own cause, and what piles up between the rounds.
Cognitive Move
Feedback and filing
Name the one place where the finished result, any corrections, and the updated state get written down, and who writes them. This is the after-the-fact record that lets the next person, including future you, start from what actually happened.
Mental Model
Feedback Calibration (Sandwich vs. Direct)
Feedback methods range from heavily buffered (the 'sandwich': positive-negative-positive) to completely direct
Mental Model
Feedback Loop Blindness
The failure to recognize or account for feedback effects in systems, leading to interventions that produce the opposite of intended outcomes
Mental Model
Feedback Loops
Circular causal mechanisms where a system's output loops back to influence its input—either REINFORCING (positive feedback: output amplifies input, producing exponential growth or decline) or BALANCING (negative feedback…
Mental Model
Feedback Loops (and Homeostasis)
Circular causal chains where a system's output feeds back as input, either amplifying change (positive/reinforcing feedback: success breeds success, panic breeds panic) or dampening it (negative/balancing feedback: therm…
Mental Model
Feedback Timing and Dosing (The Art of When and How Much)
The practitioner art of determining when, how much, and in what form to give feedback
Mental Model
Feng Shui as Environmental Psychology
Stripped of metaphysics, feng shui encodes thousands of years of empirical observation about spatial effects on psychology
Mental Model
Fermi Estimation
Fermi estimation builds an approximate answer from a defensible decomposition, rough component estimates, and consistent units
Cognitive Move
Fidelity validated
Check the new frame's own machinery for honesty. Is each label defined the same way every time you use it, are the boundaries real, do the numbers come from something measured, do the examples represent the typical case rather than the flattering one?
Mental Model
Fiduciary Duty Model
A fiduciary relationship exists when one party places special trust and confidence in another, who is obligated to act in the first party's best interest—even at their own expense
Cognitive Move
Field
Drop discrete objects entirely and treat the situation as continuous influence with gradients: everything exerts some pull everywhere, stronger here, weaker there. You stop asking which thing caused what and start asking which direction the slope runs.
Mental Model
Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn Response
The classic fight-or-flight response (Walter Cannon, 1932) has been expanded to include freeze (immobilization, dissociation, playing dead) and fawn (people-pleasing, appeasing, over-accommodating)
Mental Model
Fighting the Last War
The military and strategic error of preparing for the previous conflict rather than the next one—assuming the next challenge will resemble the last
Mental Model
Filling a Vacuum
The systems principle that any empty space—in markets, power structures, ecosystems, or social roles—will naturally be filled
Cognitive Move
filter
A switch or a set of checkboxes that hides everything failing a condition. The reader sees the same picture drawn from a subset, and the comparison they make is between what was there before and what survives. It works because the removed items are the argument: the gap between 30 sessions and 11 is the point.
Mental Model
Filter Bubble
Eli Pariser's concept that algorithmic personalization creates individual information universes where each person sees content that confirms their existing views, preferences, and beliefs—while alternative perspectives b…
Mental Model
Filter Bubble Awareness and Countermeasures
Eli Pariser's filter bubble describes personalized information ecosystems from algorithmic curation: platforms show content aligned with existing interests, creating invisible intellectual isolation
Mental Model
Financial Advisor Selection Framework
The advisor landscape deliberately confuses consumers
Mental Model
Financial Check-In Protocol for Couples
A structured monthly conversation protocol for couples to discuss money without triggering the shame, anxiety, and conflict that financial discussions typically provoke
Mental Model
Financial Contagion Pattern
The mechanism by which financial distress spreads from one entity, market, or country to others through interconnection channels that are invisible during normal times but become transmission vectors during crisis
Mental Model
Financial Independence Number (The Crossover Point)
A financial independence number is an estimated invested-capital target for a defined spending plan