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Published on:

17th Jul 2025

Murphy's Law is your secret weapon!

00:09:30 For example, take the Pareto Principle

00:12:37 Models in Brief

00:14:11 Satisficing.

00:15:34 Distinguish feeling or thinking.

00:17:13 Prioritize motion.

00:19:14 Whatever Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong.

00:21:00 Here are the takeaways from today's episode.


Practical Intelligence: How to Think Critically, Deconstruct Situations, Analyze Deeply, and Never Be Fooled By Patrick King



Hear it Here - https://bit.ly/practicalintelligenceking



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08263KGHK



In this episode, we dive into the fascinating world of practical intelligence as outlined by author Patrick King. Discover the neuroscience-backed strategies to enhance your critical thinking skills and never be fooled again!


Chapter 3 unveils the power of 'thinking in models' - a game-changing approach to problem-solving. Learn how to create mental models for faster, more accurate decision-making. We'll explore concepts like satisficing, the difference between feeling and thinking, and the importance of motion. Plus, uncover why Murphy's Law is your secret weapon!


Join us as we deconstruct these powerful insights and learn how to analyze deeply, think critically, and transform our thinking for a smarter future.

Transcript
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Ever walked away from a conversation and thought of the perfect comeback, hours too late, or felt like you were a step behind in a new situation?

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What if you could train your brain to think faster and smarter in the moment?

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Welcome to Social Skills Coaching, where you become more likable, more charismatic, and more productive.

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Today's featured book is Practical Intelligence by Patrick King.

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How to think critically, deconstruct situations, analyze deeply, and never be fooled again.

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Today's episode pulls from Chapter 3 of Practical Intelligence, and we discuss the concept of mental models.

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You may be aware that Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway is commonly associated with the advent of mental models in the business world.

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Now briefly, a mental model is just a simplified representation of how something works.

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Think of it like a shortcut for your brain.

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Instead of analyzing every single detail of a new situation, you apply a mental model you've already learned, and you can quickly understand and navigate the situation.

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You know one already, whether you know you know it or not.

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Murphy's Law.

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Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

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This is actually the fourth mental model we'll talk about, but instead of using Murphy's Law to look back and realize, well, duh, it should have known, we can implement this mental model to anticipate problems and prepare for success.

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Other mental models we'll cover in a little bit of detail today include satisficing.

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Yes, it's a made-up word, but you'll like it.

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Feeling versus thinking.

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Making sure you take emotions out of it when appropriate.

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And prioritizing motion.

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We often talk about just getting started, or in this case, why imperfect action is better than waiting for a perfect plan.

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Now remember, as you listen to this episode, if you want a quick rundown and a brief takeaway and summary of all the cogent points from this podcast, check the timestamps in the show notes, and you'll find where the takeaway sections begin to get a nice rundown of everything we've covered.

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Thanks for joining us today, and we hope you enjoy this episode.

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At this point, we’ve examined how our brains work on a biological level to periodically sabotage us.

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We’ll go along with the theme of being more intentional about our thinking as we introduce the concept of mental models and how they can act as a virtual safeguard against unintelligent (stupid) thinking.

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The name Charlie Munger might not ring a bell.

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You’re probably more familiar with his business partner, Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most famous investors.

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The two of them have worked side by side for Buffett’s multi-conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway since 1978.

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Although Munger isn’t in the spotlight as much as his partner, Buffett credits an overwhelming amount of his success to their alliance.

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Munger emerged from the shadows to give a commencement speech at USC Business School in 1994 entitled “Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom as It Relates to Investment Management & Business.” The impact of Munger’s speech has proven to be highly influential in the decades after it was delivered, as it introduced the concept of “mental models,” which was subsequently disseminated to the public at large.

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He mused,

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32 00:03:54,280 --> 00:03:58,320 “What is elementary, worldly wisdom?

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Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back.

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If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

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You’ve got to have models in your head.

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And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models.

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You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered.

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Well, they fail in school and in life.

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You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

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What are the models?

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Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least, you’ll think it does.

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You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

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It’s like the old saying, ‘To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine.

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But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world.

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So you’ve got to have multiple models.

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And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.

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That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense.

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They don’t have enough models in their heads.

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So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

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You may say, ‘My God, this is already getting way too tough.’ But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because eighty or ninety important models will carry about ninety percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person.

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And of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”

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53 00:05:56,400 --> 00:06:08,000 Additionally, Munger asserted the following about mental models: “You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely—all of them, not just a few.

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Most people are trained in one model—economics, for example—and try to solve all problems in one way.

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Munger makes it clear that to navigate the world without a well-rounded set of mental models is tantamount to taking stabs in the dark.

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There are too many variables for one to deal with effectively, and unless you have a model for which to organize them, things will go poorly.

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If life is a construction site, mental models would be how to use a hammer, a saw, nails, a sander, and so on.

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The more models you acquire, the better you can deal with the job.

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So then what exactly is a mental model?

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It’s a filter of sorts to run situations through to try to quickly gain understanding and make an optimal decision.

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They provide guidance to us as sort of rules of thumb for living.

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You can call them life heuristics or guidelines to evaluate and comprehend.

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You can also think of them as a set of goggles you can strap on that will help you pay attention to certain elements and think toward a specific goal.

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They give us the ability to filter noise from the signal.

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No model is an entirely perfect reflection of the world, but they don’t have to be.

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As long as they help us evaluate the complexity around us, they can be used to improve our decisions.

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Skepticism and critical thinking are essentially mental models for specific purposes.

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If our purpose is practical intelligence, we can easily adjust for that as well.

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We already have our own mental models; they’re what we’ve developed over the course of our lives.

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Every one of us possesses a set of values, ideas, and processes that we apply to what we see going on around us.

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Based on our own experiences, we’ve learned to process conditions and solve problems in a certain way.

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You may refuse to use banks out of distrust for large institutions and keep your money tucked under your mattress as a rule of thumb.

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While self-reliance and eschewing large institutions can be seen as a mental model, it may not be very effective, smart, or even applicable to most areas of life.

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By definition, our own mental models are limited and only reflect a biased perspective.

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These are the proverbial hammers Munger speaks of—our limited views.

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If my mental approach is the only thing I use when I’m trying to perceive and understand the world, I’m not going to have a very broad spectrum of comprehension about the world.

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Invariably, I will get some things completely wrong, and will come up blank in other situations when nothing in my experience can apply.

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Therefore, the more, the better.

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Understanding a certain object, action, event, or subject through a new viewpoint or set of standards helps you discover multiple facets about what you see, and could offer a wider array of potential solutions than you’d have if you stuck to your own frame of reference.

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This is especially helpful if these models are universal, widely applicable, and tend to lead to answers and truth rather than speculation and opinion.

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The more varied perspectives you possess, the more you can view the world in terms you can understand.

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It’s truly not what you know, but how you think.

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For example, take the Pareto Principle, a mental model that’s a personal favorite.

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It’s also called the 80/20 Rule.

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It states that in any given endeavor, 80 percent of the effects are caused by 20 percent of the causes.

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When you’re in a scenario where you’re trying to determine efficiency and what to focus on, you can strap on your Pareto Principle goggles.

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You can use this mental model to find that in the office, 80 percent of sales come from 20 percent of the customers; in a doctor’s office, 80 percent of all sports injuries are caused by the most common 20 percent of the hazards; in the gym, 80 percent of the weight lost is caused by 20 percent of the exercises, and so on.

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Now, the model might not hold true, and the numbers certainly won’t always be so exact, but it gives you an idea of how to organize your information and decision-making without even having to know anything beforehand.

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It’s a general rule of thumb that can produce a helpful truth about trends, possibilities, decisions, and insights we wouldn’t have otherwise.

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It’s a useful hammer for a certain type of situation.

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You can see how it benefits you to have a wide range of mental models to employ.

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As useful as the Pareto Principle is, it doesn’t help you decide where to go on vacation, for instance.

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You could try (80 percent of the enjoyment of a vacation comes from 20 percent of the factors), but it’s not quite suited for it.

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Of course, that’s also what Munger espoused in his reference to a latticework of mental models.

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You need multiple models from a wide variety of disciplines because life has innumerable dimensions.

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In fact, the power of mental models lies in having a latticework that is applicable across many situations.

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If you don’t have this framework, you risk falling prey to the fable of the blind men and the elephant, which goes something like the following: there were once six blind men, and they all reached out and could only feel different parts of an elephant: the knee, the side, the tusk, the trunk, the ear, and the tail.

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They all came to the conclusion that they were feeling different animals or objects.

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None of these blind men were wrong in isolation, but they could only see from a single perspective, so they were wrong about the elephant’s overall appearance.

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In other words, not everything is solvable using the Pareto Principle.

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Multiple models challenge each other to produce a more unified overview, whereas just using one or two restricts your long-range view to a limited context or discipline.

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Having a huge range of mental models can expand your viewpoint and cancel out some of the stray “errors” that using just one or two models would produce.

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This doesn’t mean you have to know all the ins and outs of a million different disciplines to employ multiple mental models.

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You just need to understand the basic points and fundamentals of a few essential ones.

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Just don’t be the person with a single hammer.

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Models in Brief

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108 00:12:42,960 --> 00:12:48,240 Munger didn’t go into specifics about his own latticework of mental models he used to make decisions.

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That’s because his particular set of models wouldn’t necessarily work for anyone else but him.

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He provided some tips to identify what models you might want to consider, but he didn’t lead anyone down the path himself.

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That’s a journey only you can make.

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But for the sake of explanation, here are a few examples of mental models so you have an idea of what they look like and how to break them down:

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114 00:13:12,520 --> 00:13:18,400 Think about secondary consequences.

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When you’re considering making a certain decision, think about the consequences the decision would have down the line—second, or third order outcomes, and further down the line if you can.

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If you are going to tip over a domino, think about the second and third dominoes to fall.

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They might not be the ones you intend.

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It’s easy to imagine how a course of action is going to affect the immediate situation, but only focusing on fixing the problem at hand could result in other problems arising.

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So to choose the most appropriate solution, think of what will happen down the road should you elect to put it into effect.

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In other words, think longer-term and outside your immediate circle of concern.

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When you run situations through this mental model, you’ll find answers that are more beneficial overall rather than engaging in immediate gratification.

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Satisficing.

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This word was introduced in 1956 as a combination of the words “satisfy” and “suffice.” The idea behind the mental model of satisficing is that in some situations, a perfect or optimal solution is impossible—no reasonable solution will fix every single problem that could use attention, and an “optimal” solution is either impossible or impractical.

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You will simply waste time and energy searching for something that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t really make a difference.

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Do you need optimal peanut butter, or will most of them do?

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If you can take a step back and understand that you only need to achieve the goal of buying peanut butter, you can move on with your life.

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What appears to be “best” is largely subjective and nothing you will probably ever notice.

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In satisficing, one retrains their focus on the most important or pivotal points that need to be addressed (not unlike the Pareto Principle), and then makes decisions that will satisfice in that context.

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Trying to come up with an exact and precise answer every single time is a needless waste of time and energy.

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When you run situations through this mental model, you’ll understand what your actual purpose is, what’s secondary, and what you can ignore completely.

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Distinguish feeling or thinking.

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It’s easy to mistake emotions for thoughts.

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Both deal with a sense of conviction.

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But emotions are immediate responses to certain sensory stimuli that aren’t always controllable, whereas thoughts come from a standpoint of calculation and consideration.

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This harkens back to the discussion of System 1 and System 2 thinking.

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In the feeling-vs.-thinking mental model, you try to instill an objective point of view as much as you can.

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This means removing your emotional investment about a certain circumstance or problem and surveying the evidence as a disinterested outsider.

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You might even try some reverse emotional engineering for a problem and consider how you might deal with a situation if you wanted to be emotional about it.

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Then you’d compare and contrast it with the situation you’re dealing with at the moment.

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Hopefully they are radically different plans of attack.

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The point of this model is to reduce the chance that you’ll make an errant decision based solely on instinct, impatience, or temper.

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It’s also a way to make sure you’re not confusing emotions with intellectual reasoning, and to help you gain some clarity on the inherent differences between the two.

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Emotional thinking can occasionally be important and even necessary, but for important decisions, clear thinking should always be the primary consideration.

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When you run situations through this mental model, you will understand what emotional attachments you have that are holding you back.

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Prioritize motion.

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Many of us have a tendency to plan a course of action across every step, accounting for every potential smaller action along the way and coming up with contingencies if something doesn’t go right.

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While some planning is a good idea, too much planning can delay the decision from being executed.

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In worst-case scenarios, spending most of the time in prep mode can result in what’s commonly called “analysis paralysis”—getting mired in the planning stage so much that nothing ever gets done.

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This mental model encourages you to start with doing and stop standing still.

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Stop trying to reason in your head, and put pen to paper.

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Whatever it is, take a step beyond your instinct.

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Make your default course of action actual, not just more planning.

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You don’t need to know every single step along the way and have a detailed set of instructions ready to go.

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You just need to be able to anticipate the next step or two.

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If you set off on a road trip, you don’t need the exact address you are driving to—you just need enough directions for the next hour or two.

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Part of the problem is hesitation from not feeling prepared.

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But the truth is, you’ll never be 100 percent prepared, not close to it.

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You’ll learn more and become more prepared by taking a single step forward and learning through experience versus endless planning from the sidelines.

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No matter how hard you plan, things will come up that you couldn’t have planned for, and your end destination might even change in the process.

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Mistakes?

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Ninety-nine percent are reversible or inconsequential.

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If it feels too early to start a certain task, that might be a sign that it’s the perfect moment to get going.

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When you run situations through this mental model, you will be quicker and farther along than anyone else.

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Whatever Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong.

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You might recognize this mental model as Murphy’s Law.

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Sometimes it is used in jest to lament someone’s misfortunes, but it can be far more useful than as a joke.

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You can use this principle when you decide on the readiness of something, or whether you yourself are prepared.

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If there is a possibility that it can go wrong, you had better fix it.

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If you know there is a weak spot, you had better address it.

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The point of this model is to use uncertainty as a sign for action.

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You’ll look differently at your decisions if you think that any chink in the armor can lead to disaster.

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When you run situations through this mental model, you will find yourself weighing the costs and benefits of allowing a mistake.

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Of course, this might come into odds with the prior mental model of prioritizing action, but that’s precisely where having a latticework is helpful.

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Not all motion is helpful, and not all double-checking is helpful, but the models give you two concrete options for how to deal with something.

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These five models can work together and cover a wide variety of situations to help you navigate life.

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But more specifically to our goal of practical intelligence and understanding the world for what it is, we’ll explore three additional mental models in greater depth.

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and that brings us to the end of this episode.

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Mental models provide a framework for decision making, allowing us to approach challenges with efficiency and wisdom.

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Here are the takeaways from today's episode.

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One of the best ways to embody practical intelligence is Charlie Munger's concept of mental models.

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These are heuristics or handy rules of thumb for how to approach situations in smart ways.

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It's when we try to freelance everything in our lives that we truly run into trouble, so having relatively universal guidelines or blueprints for how to act intelligently and efficiently can be invaluable.

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Among the innumerable approaches that exist, we talked about the Pareto principle, the 80-20 ratio, thinking about secondary consequences, distinguishing between feeling and thinking, satisficing, satisfy plus suffice, prioritizing motion over planning, and addressing Murphy's Law.

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Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

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And today we'll leave you with this familiar quote from Benjamin Franklin.

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By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

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About the Podcast

Social Skills Coaching
Become More Likable, Productive, and Charismatic
While everyone wants to make themselves and their lives better, it has been hard to find specific, actionable steps to accomplish that. Until now...

Patrick King is a Social Interaction Specialist, in other words, a dating, online dating, image, and communication, and social skills coach based in San Francisco, California. He’s also a #1 Amazon best-selling dating and relationships author with the most popular online dating book on the market and writes frequently on dating, love, sex, and relationships.

He focuses on using his emotional intelligence and understanding of human interaction to break down emotional barriers, instill confidence, and equip people with the tools they need for success. No pickup artistry and no gimmicks, simply a thorough mastery of human psychology delivered with a dose of real talk.

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