Understanding Other's Point Of View

The veil of ignorance holds that when thinking about how society should be organized, we should do so by imagining ourselves ignorant of our particular place in the world, as if there were a veil preventing us from knowing who we are.

The human tendency to gather and interpret new informati...

• Avoid succumbing to the gambler’s fallacy or the base rate fallacy.
• Anecdotal evidence and correlations you see in data are good hypothesis generators, but correlation does not imply causation—you still need to rely on well-designed experiments to draw strong conclusions.
• Loo...

In any situation where you can spot spillover effects (like a polluting factory), look for an externality (like bad health effects) lurking nearby.

Fixing it will require intervention either by fiat (like government regulation) or by setting up a marketplace system according to the Coase t...

You may also succumb to holding on to incorrect beliefs because of disconfirmation bias, where you impose a stronger burden of proof on the ideas you don’t want to believe.

The pernicious effects of confirmation bias and related models can be explained by cognitive dissonance

• Analyze conflict situations through a game-theory lens. Look to see if your situation is analogous to common situations like the prisoner’s dilemma, ultimatum game, or war of attrition.
• Consider how you can convince others to join your side by being more persuasive through the use of...

Ockham’s razor advises that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Look at your explanation of a situation, break it down into its constituent assumptions, and for each one, ask yourself: Does this assumption really need to be here? What evidence do I have that it should remain? Is i...

If you’re trying to be as objective as possible when making a decision or solving a problem, you always want to account for your frame of reference. A frame-of-reference mental trap is framing.

Framing refers to the way you present a situation or explanation. You will of c...

• Choose activities to work on based on their relevance to your north star.
• Focus your time on just one of these truly important activities at a time (no multitasking!), making it the top idea on your mind.
• Select between options based on opportunity cost models. 
• Use t...

• When tempted to use a pro-con list, consider upgrading to cost-benefit analysis or decision tree as appropriate.
• When making any quantitative assessment, run a sensitivity analysis across inputs to uncover key drivers and appreciate where you may need to seek greater accuracy in your...

• Find a secret and build your career or organization around it, searching via customer development for product/market fit (or another “fit” relevant to the situation).
• Strive to be like a heat-seeking missile in your search for product/market fit, deftly navigating the idea maze. Look...

Most respectful interpretation(MRI): In any situation, you can explain a person’s behavior in many ways. MRI asks you to interpret the other parties’ actions in the most respectful way possible.

Hanlon’s razor invites you to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ca...

Thinking Gray: You may think about issues in terms of black and white, but the truth is somewhere in between, a shade of gray. A truly effective leader, however, needs to be able to see the shades of gray inherent in a situation in order to make wise decisions as to how to procee...

People are not interchangeable. They come from a variety of backgrounds and with a varied set of personalities, strengths, and goals. To be the best manager, you must manage the person, accounting for each individual’s unique set of characteristics and current challenges.

Craft unique roles...

Adopt an experimental mindset, looking for opportunities to run experiments and apply the scientific method wherever possible.

Respect inertia: create or join healthy flywheels; avoid strategy taxes and trying to enact change in high-inertia situations unless you have a tactical advantage s...

Thinking about a problem from an inverse perspective can unlock new solutions and strategies.

The central mental model to help you become a chef with your thinking is arguing from first principles. It’s the practical starting point to being wrong less, and it means thinking...

When arguing from first principles, you are deliberately starting from scratch. You are explicitly avoiding the potential trap of conventional wisdom, which could turn out to be wrong.

To be wrong less, you need to test your assumptions in the real world, a process known as de-risking. The...