Become A Remarkable Thinker Using These Mental Models

Scarcity makes you laser-focused by forcing prioritization. It slaps you into a mindset that values every bit of time, energy, and resources. Dedicate your constrained self to what truly matters. You only get so much mental bandwidth, physical energy, and resources. Set limits on distractions. Don’t spend time with drainers. Operate while being mindful of how limited everything and everyone is. With that lens, you aren’t likely to make rash trade-offs.

The margin of safety encourages you to build buffers into your decisions. Allow room for error and uncertainty. Make it so that if you win, you win, and if you lose, you win. You do this by factoring in what could go wrong and developing a more resilient process. Try to design your life in a way that even if your plans and conclusions are jeopardized, you hold up. Adversity should be a stop, not a catastrophe.

Inertia is the tendency to stick with the status quo. To stick to what you have been doing all along. It’s a barrier to change, by definition. Understanding inertia helps you recognize what’s holding you back. Strategize to overcome it. The phone is keeping you from concentrating on work. Turn on airplane mode. The cookies on your kitchen counter keep you snacking and fat. Don’t place them there or, better yet, don’t buy them at all.

The 80/20 rule or Pareto principle redirects your thinking. Focus on the top 20 percent of inputs that generate 80 percent of outputs. Spend your energy on the most impactful decisions and problems. Your processing power is limited. Use your data plan scrupulously. Similarly, align with your strengths: leverage your natural abilities and knowledge. It is likely that you will have the biggest effort-impact ratio here. By concentrating on what you know and do best, you accelerate your ability to innovate and think up optimal solutions.

Now get thinking. Invert. Drive your brain in reverse. Consider the exact opposite perspective. Not how to guarantee success, but how to fail. Not what could go right, but what could go wrong. Think second-order. Consider the long-term consequences of your decisions. You can combine these and use them simultaneously. Long-term, inverted thinking helps uncover blind spots and develop solutions. You flip your problems and your thought processes on their head. This way you see the ripple effects of choices you didn’t even know you could make.

But don’t stop there. You might be in a filter bubble. These distort your thinking by presenting curated information to you that reinforces your current beliefs. Step outside of them by trying to prove yourself wrong. Think critically of your assumptions. You shouldn’t always believe what you believe. Perhaps exploit the five-whys technique here: ask “Why?” repeatedly to dig into the root of your ideas. This prevents superficial thinking by uncovering foundational, non-surface-level issues.

Everything is a trade-off. Opportunity cost reminds you that one option means forgoing every other. Evaluate alternatives. Else you might be going fast but getting nowhere. Make sure that your choices align with your long-term objectives. This is the principle of velocity: it takes into account both direction and speed. Effective thinkers balance urgency with intention. In other words, they make decisions that are both timely and strategically sound. You can do the same by being mindful of opportunity costs and having an end goal in mind.

The least effort principle reminds you that humans favor the simplest, easier path. Useful for efficiency. Not for deep thinking. Recognize it in yourself: the shortcut to work, picking an easier meal over the healthier alternative. Resist defaulting to the easiest answer. Rather, climb up and down the abstraction ladder. Move between high-level conceptual thinking, to low-level, concrete, detailed specifics. This enables you to overcome the path of least resistance while considering both the bigger picture and the microscopic detail. Once you practice and get a grasp of these mental models, you will be well on your way to becoming a high-level thinker. Enjoy.