Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

Outstanding ideas can make you rich, famous, and successful in life beyond your highest expectations. Just consider the most famous and successful people in art, science, religion, politics, business, computers, and finance, to see how there are always genuine, successful ideas at the base of their fame and fortune. However, your meaning in life may not always be about money, power, and success, but about love, family values, freedom, and knowledge, among other lifetime achievements that can never be controlled by others, regardless of how powerful, wealthy, or influential they are. Yet power and material wealth are always used to influence every outcome of life and society, forcing society to behave in a fictitious, unnatural manner. And now, how exactly can your ideas become extraordinary enough to influence the entire society, as challenged as it may be? Your ideas relate directly to your needs and fulfillment, while your needs and fulfillment in life determine your behavior and entire social interconnectivity. Your entire lifetime behavior influences the shape and structure of society, with society determining your lifestyle, development, and thinking, as these influence your knowledge, mental models and ideas, along with all success that these may offer. With everything related to material wealth, power, and influence on one side, and with your ideas, development, lifestyle, interconnectivity, and reasoning on the other. And this is how you are forced to behave in life not naturally, but in a specific, fictitious, controlled manner, while fulfilling your needs. This is why you are deliberately made to fulfill needs by using money, power, and influence, as these are sufficient to limit you to a lower developmental level. While this happens for your outstanding ideas, to keep them out of the way. Because in order for others to implement their ideas in the world and become successful, your own ideas must remain ignored, useless, and banned, for as long as possible. This happens just because the human timeline is unique, and currently, it unfolds according to very specific fictitious restraints, part of an entire Fictitious Matrix, which covers most of the wider world. What can you do? You may do nothing against an entire Fictitious Matrix, including its own, imposed human timeline. However, as a living human being, you can do everything according to your own needs and meanings on Earth since Earth is yours, and therefore you may always have your own thoughts and ideas in this world. Have as many ideas as you want, make them awesome as you persevere and develop, always develop. Because knowledge, thinking, and successful ideas are always at the roots of your achievements in life, standing at the base of your cognitive system and social life, and therefore influencing directly your continuous interconnectivity within your inner and outer spheres of influence. If you want to have genuine, successful ideas, then you have to understand how you generate and control them, and how your ideas integrate within your cognitive system. This book describes how to conduct your mental models in order to generate successful ideas throughout life, focusing on business, art, social interaction, science, sports, and much more.

One of the most famous science books of our time, the phenomenal national bestseller that "buzzes with energy, anecdote and life. It almost makes you want to become a physicist" (Science Digest). Richard P. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. In this lively work that “can shatter the stereotype of the stuffy scientist” (Detroit Free Press), Feynman recounts his experiences trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets—and much more of an eyebrow-raising nature. In his stories, Feynman’s life shines through in all its eccentric glory—a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah. Included for this edition is a new introduction by Bill Gates.

This is the second book in The Great Mental Models series and the highly anticipated follow up to the Wall Street Journal best seller, Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts. We tend to isolate the things we know in the domain we learned it. For example: What does the inertia of a rolling stone have to do with perseverance and being open minded? How can the ancient process of steel production make you a more creative and innovative thinker? What does the replication of our skin cells have to do with being a stronger and more effective leader? On the surface, these concepts may appear to be dissimilar and unrelated. But the surprising truth is the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology) offer a wealth of useful tools you can use to develop critically important skills like: * Relationship building * Leadership * Communication * Creativity * Curiosity * Problem solving * Decision-making This second volume of the Great Mental Models series shows you how to make those connections. It explores the core ideas from the hard sciences and offers nearly two dozen models to add to your mental toolbox. You'll not only get a better understanding of the forces that influence the world around you, but you'll learn how to direct those forces to create outsized advantages in the areas of your life that matter most to you.

Have you ever thought about the fact that a craftsman has more and better tools to solve challenges on the job than the leader of a business or organization does? Leadership "tools" are usually defined as computers, spreadsheets, data, and even experience, but in reality, leaders need thinking tools that are hard to come by, so they find themselves hunting and pecking for answers in books, at seminars, through on-the-job training programs, from mentors, and at business schools, and still, they're left with gaps. Surely, most leaders are good at what they do, but the daily challenges of their jobs, like accelerating growth, increasing productivity, driving innovation, doing more with less, and balancing work with life don't come with some sort of leadership toolkit...until now. In Paid to Think, international consultant David Goldsmith presents his groundbreaking approach to leadership and management based on research revealing the twelve specific activities that all leaders perform on a daily basis, and he provides you with each activity's accompanying tools and instructions proven to boost your performance and that of your entire organization. Take the uncertainty out of everyday leading, convert ideas to realities, and maximize your intellectual value. Learn how decision makers at some of the world's most successful organizations have already used Paid to Think's universal and easily transferable tools—regardless of their industries, sectors, geographic locations, or management levels—as their greatest advantages in achieving more, earning more, and living more.

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

30 Practical and applicable guidelines to think smarter, faster, and with expert insight (even if you aren’t one). Mental models are like giving a treasure map to someone lost in the woods. They provide instant understanding, context, and most importantly, a path to the end destination. Now imagine having such a map for all problems and decisions in your life. Battle information overwhelm, focus on what really matters, and make complex decisions with speed and confidence. Mental Models: 30 Thinking Tools sheds light on true intelligence: it’s not about knowledge and knowing the capitals of all the countries in the world. It’s about how you think, and each mental model is a specific framework on how to think smart and with insight. You can approach the world by trying to analyze each piece of information separately, or you can learn mental models that do the work for you. Learn how billionaires/CEOs, Olympic athletes, and scientists think differently and avoid mistakes. Peter Hollins has studied psychology and peak human performance for over a dozen years and is a bestselling author. He has worked with a multitude of individuals to unlock their potential and path towards success. His writing draws on his academic, coaching, and research experience.

Work with data like a pro using this guide that breaks down how to organize, apply, and most importantly, understand what you are analyzing in order to become a true data ninja. From the stock market to genomics laboratories, census figures to marketing email blasts, we are awash with data. But as anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet packed with seemingly infinite lines of data knows, numbers aren't enough: we need to know how to make those numbers talk. In The Model Thinker, social scientist Scott E. Page shows us the mathematical, statistical, and computational models—from linear regression to random walks and far beyond—that can turn anyone into a genius. At the core of the book is Page's "many-model paradigm," which shows the reader how to apply multiple models to organize the data, leading to wiser choices, more accurate predictions, and more robust designs. The Model Thinker provides a toolkit for business people, students, scientists, pollsters, and bloggers to make them better, clearer thinkers, able to leverage data and information to their advantage.

As the digital economy changes the rules of the game for enterprises, the role of software and IT architects is also transforming. Rather than focus on technical decisions alone, architects and senior technologists need to combine organizational and technical knowledge to effect change in their company’s structure and processes. To accomplish that, they need to connect the IT engine room to the penthouse, where the business strategy is defined. In this guide, author Gregor Hohpe shares real-world advice and hard-learned lessons from actual IT transformations. His anecdotes help architects, senior developers, and other IT professionals prepare for a more complex but rewarding role in the enterprise. This book is ideal for: Software architects and senior developers looking to shape the company’s technology direction or assist in an organizational transformation Enterprise architects and senior technologists searching for practical advice on how to navigate technical and organizational topics CTOs and senior technical architects who are devising an IT strategy that impacts the way the organization works IT managers who want to learn what’s worked and what hasn’t in large-scale transformation

Offers real-life stories, items, and methods that allow for a deeper understanding of any issue, provide the power to use failure as a step toward success, and develop a habit of creating probing questions.