What are mental models and how to start applying them

Your mind is a powerful tool. The thoughts you choose to let take up space in your mind develop into attitudes, beliefs, and ultimately action. Therefore, if you want to change your actions, you need to start with your thoughts.

Mental models are methods to help you frame your thinking, make decisions, and act quickly. Most of the time, we know what to do to improve, but how to do it and how to remain disciplined over time is another story. If you’re looking for a self-improvement solution to build healthy habits in your life, then mental models might be just what you need.

What are mental models?

Mental models are a method or framework providing rules of thumb on how to make decisions. Mental models can also help you understand life and perceive the world around you. Mental models cannot solve all of life’s problems, but they can be useful to help you see the world and build habits of making good decisions.

Mental models help you get out of your trained, biased way of thinking and into a plane of seeing the world from a new perspective. For example, if you have a marketing background then you see the world through marketing models. But your friend with an engineering background sees the world through engineering models. If you combine both perspectives, you can solve problems that you couldn’t on your own. Mental models train your brain to think through challenges and decisions with the power of having multiple backgrounds yourself.

When to use mental models

If you need to build better habits and consistently make good decisions, but you don’t always know everything about a situation, then mental models can help as a shortcut. Cut through complex things to simple reasoning. Mental models can help you prioritize your time, think through a problem, and so much more.

Use mental models to answer questions like are you spending your time wisely, are you in the right job, did you choose the right major, are your friendships bringing you happiness or are you dating the right person?

Basically, mental models can help you to self-improvement in every area of your life. They are designed to help you repeatedly make good decisions, which can lead to compounding returns in life. Often, when we make mistakes, we have made a decision based on an erroneous mental model. Studying correct mental models can help us make better decisions, quicker and more consistently over time.

You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to make the most impact — you simply need to build space for clear thinking processes. The Jeff Bezos’, Elon Musk’s, and Warren Buffett’s of the world consistently use clear models of thinking which enable them to accomplish so much more than average and have a huge impact on the world.

What’s the difference between mental models and normal human thinking?

You probably never learned mental models in school, so you make decisions based on the biological way your brain is wired — through fight or flight response. Most of us make decisions based on whatever is easiest, most convenient, or in line with our instincts.

For example, you may need to decide how to prioritize your time. If you stick with what is easiest, you will spend your time on the easiest tasks but may neglect the most important ones. And if you are following your instincts, let’s be honest most of the time my instincts are to sleep in or watch Netflix! And that certainly doesn’t help you accomplish more. Mental models can help you make the right decisions consistently to accomplish more and make a bigger impact.

The truth is, outliers like Elon Musk are not that different from the rest of us. Yes, people like Elon Musk have high IQs, had many opportunities in life which they seized, and are very well educated. But there are plenty of other privileged, intelligent, educated people out there that never even come close to the same impact of Musk. The difference is that Musk, Bezos and Buffett learned to use mental models. You can learn to think like the outliers by building habits practicing mental models.

How to use mental models

Mental models can help you break the word into a patchwork of systems; everything can be broken down into a system of processes, tools and a state of being. For instance, the business system is built on the process of economic growth, using tools like the product you sell, which leads to the state of being of wealth. When you improve the system of business, you also impact the state of being — AKA you make more money and build more wealth for the business.

Forget what the world wants you to think about the system and boil it down to its simplest form with a mental model. This process will help you solve problems in innovative ways. You can start with one mental model but should build on that with others to gain new perspectives for approaching a problem.

Knowing just one mental model is not enough. Each model offers a unique framework but the power of decision-making lies in combining them. You need a ‘latticework’ of mental models according to Charlie Munger, Vice Chairmen of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. “You can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”

Obstacles to applying mental models

The main obstacle to applying mental models is discipline. It’s can be a painful, time-consuming process to break down your thought patterns and potentially start from scratch. And it’s not part of our biology — humans tend to choose the easiest route. Using mental models requires continually reevaluating your progress and adjusting your course. And that’s why the biggest obstacle to mental models is disciplining yourself to regularly evaluate your decisions instead of going with the flow.

Learn More

If you are interested in practicing mental models, I’ve developed a collection of mental models in Notion that you can use to track your thought processes in writing. I have some templates for different mental models that you can duplicate and use for your personal or work decisions. Check out Notionery and see if it can help you build better habits through mental models.