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People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.

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Mental Model

Mere Association

The tendency to connect two things simply because they occur together, regardless of any causal relationship

Mental Model

Mere Exposure Effect

Robert Zajonc's finding that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for it—even without any interaction, reinforcement, or positive association

Cognitive Move

Merge by function

Collapse two or more of your existing categories into one when they do the same job for you. Different labels, identical behavior, identical decision. Where splitting divides a crowded bucket, this asks which separate buckets you never actually treat differently.

Mental Model

Mestizaje (Cultural Hybridity)

Mestizaje (from 'mestizo' -- mixed) is the Latin American framework for understanding cultural, racial, and intellectual hybridity as a source of creative strength rather than contamination or dilution

Mental Model

Metabolic Health Framework

Metabolic health describes the body's ability to efficiently process energy—specifically, to maintain blood glucose, insulin, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist circumference within healthy ranges…

Mental Model

Metabolic Rate Scaling

Metabolic scaling studies relationships between body size and metabolic rate, often using a power-law model

Mental Model

Metcalfe’s Law

The foundational network economics principle that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users

Cognitive Move

Method through CONTACT

Generate several candidate ways to check the claim and pick the cheapest one that is structurally capable of answering it.

Cognitive Move

Metric Courtroom

Put your metric on trial for 40 seconds: what does it predict, how can it be gamed, and what would expose the game?

Mental Model

Micro-Recovery Practices

Micro-recoveries are brief (30 seconds to 5 minutes) restorative activities interspersed throughout the workday that partially reset physiological stress markers without requiring full breaks

Mental Model

Microbiome as Ecosystem

The microbiome can be studied as an ecosystem of microorganisms interacting with a host and environment

Mental Model

Micronutrient Optimization

Micronutrient optimization focuses on ensuring adequate vitamins and minerals serving as cofactors for thousands of enzymatic reactions

Mental Model

Micropayment

Very small financial transactions (typically under $1) that allow pay-per-use access to content, services, or digital goods

Cognitive Move

Middle alternative

Build a partial version that takes some of each pole instead of all of one. You split the scarce thing the binary fights over, usually time, money, or commitment, so both sides get a real share rather than one winning outright.

Mental Model

Middle Path / Goldilocks Zone

A heuristic for investigating whether an adjustable quantity has a useful range between harmful insufficiency and excess

Mental Model

Middle Way (Avoiding Extremes)

In an early Buddhist formulation, the Middle Way avoids indulgence and self-affliction through the Noble Eightfold Path

Cognitive Move

Milestones

Name the intermediate stages that count as real progress toward the outcome, each one observable enough that you can tell whether you've reached it. Not how fast you move or in what order, just the checkpoints themselves.

Mental Model

Mimetic Theory (René Girard)

Girard's theory that human desire is fundamentally imitative—we don't want things intrinsically but because we see others wanting them

Mental Model

Mindful Eating Practice

Mindful eating applies contemplative awareness to eating: paying attention to sensory experience, eating slowly, recognizing hunger and satiety signals, and noticing emotional triggers without judgment