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. “I’m really glad this exists in the world and I can see that I will be recommending it often.” — Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, founder and CEO of Automattic “If you’ve read Charlie Munger’s Almanack this is the book you deeply crave in its wake. … Learn the big ideas from the big disciplines and you’ll be able to twist and turn problems in interesting ways at unprecedented speeds. … You owe yourself this book.” — Simon Eskildsen “This is what non-fiction books should aspire to be like. Informative, concise, universal, practical, visual, sharing stories and examples for context. Definitely, a must-read if you’re into universal multi-disciplinary thinking.” — Carl Rannaberg “I can truly say it is one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure of getting lost in. I loved the book and the challenges to conventional wisdom and thinking it presents.” — Rod Berryman “Want to learn? Read This! This should be a standard text for high school and university students.” — Code Cubitt Shane Parrish is the author of the New York Times bestseller Clear Thinking . He is an entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind the popular website Farnam Street, where he focuses on turning timeless insights into action. His work has been featured in nearly every major publication, including The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , and The Economist . His weekly newsletter, Brain Food , has captivated the minds of over half a million subscribers worldwide and his podcast, The Knowledge Project , is one of the most popular in the world. Introduction: Acquiring Wisdom You're only as good as your tools. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. -Charlie Munger In life and business, the person with the fewest blind spots wins. Blind spots are the source of all poor decisions. Think about it: If you had perfect information, you would always make the best decision. In a poker game where you could see everyone's cards, you'd play your hand perfectly. You wouldn't make any mistakes. Unfortunately, we have a lot of blind spots. And while we can't eliminate them, we can reduce them. Reducing blind spots means we see, interact with, and move closer to understanding reality. We think better. And thinking better is about finding simple processes that help us work through problems from multiple dimensions and perspectives, allowing us to better choose solutions that fit the objective. The skill behind finding the right solutions for the right problems is one form of wisdom. This book is about the pursuit of that type of wisdom-the pursuit of uncovering how things work, the pursuit of going to bed smarter than when we woke up. It is a book about getting out of our own way so we can better understand how the world really is. Decisions based on improved understanding will be better than ones based on ignorance. While, inevitably, we can't predict which problems will crop up in life, we can learn time-tested ideas that help position us for whatever the world throws at us. Perhaps more importantly, this book is about avoiding problems. This often comes down to understanding a problem accurately and seeing the secondary and subsequent consequences of any proposed action. The author and explorer of mental models Peter Bevelin put it best: "I don't want t