One of the most difficult aspects of using Mental Models to improve your thinking is to remember which models to use and when.
I struggle with this myself: when I’m tired, or stressed, or just plain distracted, I find myself in situations where I try to make important decisions and either I forget the relevant models or I don’t use them efficiently.
And from the emails this site has generated it looks like many of you struggle with this as well.
One thing I’ve tried to do in order to help myself be more systematic about how I use my models is to organize them into a checklist that I have posted on the wall where I work.
This way I can just look up and use it as a reference whenever I need to, which I think is a system Charlie would like:
“I’m a great believer in solving hard problems by using a checklist. You need to get all the likely and unlikely answers before you; otherwise it’s easy to miss something important.” – Charlie Munger
Some of you have asked if I would be willing to share my list of models. This made me realize that I had a site that talks about Mental Models but that doesn’t actually list the models I use.
To fix that, below is a link to the checklist I’ve been using for many years now:
You can also check out my list of Mental Model Summaries:
Enjoy, and please let me know what you think of both in the comments below.
I think you really need to have these ingrained into your memory so they will be obvious based on the situation. I think the checklist is more just to learn them until you know them.
Great work but way too many in my opinion. A checklist can`t be this long or it would lack efficiency, maybe you could remove some that are redundant or less of a “general model”? Just trying to be constructive
I am new to this idea of mental models. The PDF is a great starting point, but I would like an explanation of each. How can I understand each model?