Mental Model
Mindful Parenting (Present-Moment Awareness in the Parent-Child Relationship)
Mindful parenting is a framework for attending deliberately to parent-child interactions
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Mental Model
Mindfulness Practice Starter Protocol
A graduated protocol for integrating mindfulness into daily life without requiring formal meditation sessions, designed for people who find sitting meditation difficult or unappealing
Mental Model
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (Kabat-Zinn)
Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR program, developed at UMass Medical School in 1979, systematically adapted Buddhist mindfulness practices for secular clinical use
Cognitive Move
Minimal Pair
When two concepts blur together, build two cases identical except for one feature and ask whether your classification or action should change.
Mental Model
Minimax Regret
A decision strategy that minimizes the maximum regret you could experience—where regret is the difference between the outcome of your choice and the best outcome you could have achieved
Cognitive Move
Minimum degraded mode
Name the smallest version of the thing that still counts as alive rather than lost. It sets the floor you defend under pressure, so you know what to cut to and what you refuse to drop below.
Mental Model
Minimum Effective Tool Stack
The principle that the optimal set of tools is the smallest set that covers all essential functions—minimizing the overhead of tool management, switching costs, integration complexity, and learning curves while maintaini…
Cognitive Move
Minimum Necessary Context
Share only the information a helper or tool actually needs for the task, and strip the rest.
Mental Model
Minimum Viable Product
An MVP is a version or arrangement designed to obtain useful learning about a new offer with limited effort
Mental Model
Minimum Viable Toolset Principle
The optimal number of tools is the fewest covering all essential capabilities without significant gaps
Mental Model
Minority Rule (Stubborn Minorities)
Taleb's observation that a small, intransigent minority can dictate the behavior of a flexible majority—because the majority will accommodate the minority's preferences at minimal cost, while the minority won't budge
Mental Model
Mirroring and Labeling Technique
Mirroring (repeating the last 1-3 key words of what someone just said) and labeling (articulating the emotion behind their words) are two of the most powerful information-gathering and rapport-building techniques in nego…
Mental Model
Mis-weighting (Vivid vs Statistical Evidence)
The systematic tendency to overweight vivid, emotional, or personally experienced evidence and underweight statistical, abstract, or base-rate evidence
Cognitive Move
Missing Column
When a debate keeps repeating, put the options in rows and add the one column whose values could reverse the judgment.
Cognitive Move
Missingness
Decide in advance what happens to cases where the data never arrived: dropped, counted as failures, or set aside as unknown. Also set the threshold of absent data at which the number stops being reportable at all.
Mental Model
Mission Command (Auftragstaktik)
The German military doctrine of telling subordinates WHAT to achieve but not HOW to achieve it—giving clear objectives, boundaries, and intent while leaving tactical execution to the person closest to the situation
Mental Model
Mission Drift
The gradual, often imperceptible shift of an organization away from its founding purpose, usually toward whatever generates the most revenue, prestige, or internal comfort
Mental Model
Mitochondrial Theory of Aging
The mitochondrial theory of aging proposes that progressive mitochondrial dysfunction is a primary driver of aging and age-related disease
Mental Model
Moat (Economic Moat)
An economic moat is a metaphor for a competitive advantage that is difficult to erode
Mental Model
Mode Confusion Error
The system failure where an operator takes the correct action for the wrong system state, producing catastrophic results
Mental Model
Models of Reality
All understanding is mediated through models—simplified representations that capture some features of reality while ignoring others
Cognitive Move
Moderators
Ask under what conditions the effect gets stronger, weaker, or flips direction. Not what carries the effect or what fakes it, but what dials it up or down, which explains why the same cause produces different results for different people or times.
Mental Model
Modularity
Modularity organizes a system into components whose interactions are governed by defined interfaces, aiming to limit the reach of particular changes