Great men are almost always bad men.

Developing the habit of mastering the multiple models which underlie reality is the best thing you can do.

If you have more than one model, you can look at problems from a variety of perspectives and increase the odds you come to better solutions.

The Creativity Question published in 1976, preserves Wallas’s “Stages of Control” and presents his model of insight: (1) preparation; (2) incubation; (3) illumination; and (4) verification.

Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns.

Stories are a way we frame and organize the details of a situation. There are other types of frames besides stories, such as maps and even organizational wiring diagrams that show where people stand in a hierarchy. … These kinds of stories organize all kinds of details about a situation and depend on a few core beliefs we can call “anchors,” because they are fairly stable and anchor the way we interpret the other details.

One of my favorite questions to probe thinking is to ask what information would cause someone to change their mind. Immediately stop listening and leave if they say ‘I can’t think of anything.’

Let me think about that for a bit and get back to you.

Acquiring knowledge may seem like a daunting task. There is so much to know and time is precious. Luckily, we don’t have to master everything. To get the biggest bang for the buck we can study the big ideas from physics, biology, psychology, philosophy, literature, and sociology. Our aim is not to remember facts and try to repeat them when asked. We’re going to try and hang these ideas on a latticework of mental models. Doing this puts them in a useable form and enables us to make better decisions. A mental model is simply a representation of an external reality inside your head. Mental models are concerned with understanding knowledge about the world. Decisions are more likely to be correct when ideas from multiple disciplines all point towards the same conclusion.