People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
The specific form of denial where the psychological pain of acknowledging a reality is so great that the mind refuses to process the information—not through deliberate deception but through unconscious protective filteri…
Munger's term for the tendency to deny or distort reality when the truth is too painful to accept—the psychological immune system that protects against unbearable truths by simply rejecting them
The brain's fundamental motivational architecture: we approach what promises pleasure and avoid what threatens pain
Physical pain and chemical substances (alcohol, drugs, medication, sleep deprivation-induced neurochemical changes) directly impair cognitive function, producing poor judgment that the person experiencing it often cannot…
The palaver is a West and Central African tradition of extended community dialogue used to resolve disputes, make collective decisions, and restore social harmony
Kuhn describes scientific development through work within shared frameworks and episodes of substantial framework change
Meadows identifies paradigms as potentially powerful influences on system goals and design
The phenomenon where the more reliable an automated system becomes, the more catastrophic its failures are—because human operators lose the skill and attention needed to intervene when automation fails
Barry Schwartz's observation that while some choice is essential for autonomy and satisfaction, too much choice produces paralysis, anxiety, and decreased satisfaction
Get genuinely independent answers before anyone sees anyone else's, then adjudicate.
When adult relationships (romantic, professional, friendships) unconsciously replicate parent-child power dynamics rather than operating as peer-to-peer exchanges
Discard every option that some other option beats on all objectives at once. What survives is the set where any gain in one good costs you something in another. Unlike a priority order, this narrows the field without picking the winner.
Pareto efficiency means no feasible change can make someone better off without making anyone worse off, under the specified preferences and constraints
Every candidate plotted against two goals you both want. The outer edge, where no point is better on both, is the frontier. Points inside it are dominated: some other option beats them on both goals, so they can be dropped without regret.
Keep the set of non-dominated options and refuse to collapse plural values into one fake score.
The Pareto principle suggests checking for concentrated contributions, often summarized heuristically as eighty-twenty
A facilitation technique for managing tangential discussions without losing valuable ideas or derailing the meeting
A satirical observation that work can expand to occupy available time, often used to question elastic scope, unnecessary elaboration, and bureaucratic growth.
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where community members directly decide how to allocate public budget
Separate resources that should not compete in or contaminate one shared pool.
The communication failure where hostility is expressed indirectly through actions rather than words, making it difficult to address because the surface behavior is plausible deniable
Password hygiene follows three principles: uniqueness (every account gets a different password so one breach doesn't cascade), complexity (resisting brute-force attacks), and management (human memory replaced by password…
Specify the milestones, speed, and acceptable means so the journey itself doesn't become the casualty.
Path dependence concerns persistent effects of history on present possibilities or later outcomes through specified mechanisms