Location 13:

When you learn to see the world as it is, and not as you want it to be, everything changes.

Location 78:

I went from theoretical examples that were completely divorced from the real world, to the wisdom behind the achievements of one of the most successful businessmen of all time.

Location 85:

latticework of mental models. These are chunks of knowledge from different disciplines that can be simplified and applied to better understand the world.

Location 230:

The pursuit of understanding fuels meaning and adaptation,

Location 231:

Understanding only becomes useful when we adjust our behavior and actions accordingly.

Location 253:

We optimize for short-term ego protection over long-term happiness.

Location 267:

Gravity diminishes with distance, and so too does your propensity to make an impulse buy.

Location 284:

Sometimes making good decisions boils down to avoiding bad ones.

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Location 292:

Only by repeated testing of our models against reality and being open to feedback can we update our understanding of the world and change our thinking.

Location 297:

Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinary mindset that we need to accurately see a problem.

Location 313:

the key to sample sizes is to look for them not just over space, but over time. You need to reach back into the past as far as you can to contribute to your sample. We have a tendency to think that how the world is, is how it always was. And so we get caught up validating our assumptions from what we find in the here and now.

Location 344:

The world does not isolate itself into discrete disciplines. We only break it down that way because it makes it easier to study it.

Location 365:

What successful people do is file away a massive, but finite, amount of fundamental, established, essentially unchanging knowledge that can be used in evaluating the infinite number of unique scenarios which show up in the real world.

Location 378:

The more you use them, the more you will be able to build the knowledge of indicators that can trigger the use of the most appropriate model. Using and failing, as long as you acknowledge, reflect, and learn from it, is also how you build your repertoire. You need to be deliberate about choosing the models you will use in a situation. As you use them, a great practice is to record and reflect.

Location 393:

Mental models are not an excuse to create a lengthy decision process but rather to help you move away from seeing things the way you think they should be to the way they are.

Location 415:

Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of what they represent.

Location 449:

if the aim becomes simplification rather than understanding we start to make bad decisions.

Location 546:

a cautionary tale of what can happen when faith in the model influences the decisions we make in the territory. When we try to fit complexity into the simplification.

Location 554:

in using maps, abstractions, and models, we must always be wise to their limitations.

Location 576:

Maps, or models, are necessary but necessarily flawed.

Location 591:

When ego and not competence drives what we undertake, we have blind spots. If you know what you understand, you know where you have an edge over others. When you are honest about where your knowledge is lacking you know where you are vulnerable and where you can improve. Understanding your circle of competence improves decision-making and outcomes.

Location 656:

One of the essential requirements of a circle of competence is that you can never take it for granted. You can’t operate as if a circle of competence is a static thing, that once attained is attained for life. The world is dynamic. Knowledge gets updated, and so too must your circle.

Location 660:

Learning comes when experience meets reflection.

Location 771:

a good theory must have an element of risk to it—namely, it has to risk being wrong.

Location 796:

Trend is not destiny.

Location 824:

First principles thinking doesn’t have to be quite so grand. When we do it, we aren’t necessarily looking for absolute truths.

Location 825:

knowledge can only be built when we are actively trying to falsify it

Location 834:

If we never learn to take something apart, test our assumptions about it, and reconstruct it, we end up bound by what other people tell us—trapped in the way things have always been done.

Location 838:

everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are bitcoin. So is love.

Location 858:

If your “whys” result in a statement of falsifiable fact, you have hit a first principle. If they end up with a “because I said so” or ”it just is”, you know you have landed on an assumption that may be based on popular opinion, cultural myth, or dogma. These are not first principles.

Location 908:

The real power of first principles thinking is moving away from random change and into choices that have a real possibility of success.

Location 993:

the act of detailing out the choices we would make in these alternate realities that have otherwise similar properties to our current one, doing the thought experiment, is what leads to insights regarding what we value in life and where to focus our energies.

Location 1031:

Sometimes it is easy to imagine ten different ways a situation could have played out differently, but more of a stretch to change the variables and still end up with the same thing.

Location 1276:

We either will get hit by lightning today or we won’t. The problem is, we just don’t know until we live out the day.

Location 1378:

“upside optionality”, that is, seeking out situations that we expect have good odds of offering us opportunities.

Location 1386:

Those who are not afraid to fail (properly) have a huge advantage over the rest. What they learn makes them less vulnerable to the volatility of the world. They benefit from it, in true antifragile fashion.

Location 1420:

Intelligence is not evidence.

Location 1438:

Successfully thinking in shades of probability means roughly identifying what matters, coming up with a sense of the odds, doing a check on our assumptions, and then making a decision.

Location 1518:

Inversion is a powerful tool to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove obstacles to success.

Location 1519:

As a thinking tool it means approaching a situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point.

Location 1522:

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

Location 1526:

Instead of aiming directly for your goal, think deeply about what you want to avoid and then see what options are left over.

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Location 1533:

inversion is a staple of mathematical, philosophical, and scientific inquiry.

Location 1537:

He hit an impasse, realizing that he’d never be able to definitely solve the problem by thinking forward.

Location 1566:

By starting with the logical outcome of his assumptions and seeking to validate those, he advances his case with significantly more efficiency and accuracy than if he had searched first for proof of the assumptions themselves.

Location 1586:

Although the campaign utilized more principles than just inversion, it was the original decision to invert the approach that provided the framework from which the campaign was created and executed.

Location 1589:

he thought about what the world would look like if women smoked often and anywhere, and then set about trying to make that world a reality.

Location 1593:

What are you trying to avoid? Instead of thinking through the achievement of a positive outcome, we could ask ourselves how we might achieve a terrible outcome, and let that guide our decision-making.

Location 1604:

not getting rich, but avoiding being poor.

Location 1620:

Whatever angle you choose to approach your problem from, you need to then follow with consideration of the opposite angle. Think about not only what you could do to solve a problem, but what you could do to make it worse—and then avoid doing that, or eliminate the conditions that perpetuate it.

Location 1677:

Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones.

Location 1745:

Simplicity can increase efficiency

Location 1749:

unnecessary complexity just papers over the systemic flaws that will eventually choke us.

Location 1816:

Hanlon’s Razor states that we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity.

Location 1818:

look for options instead of missing opportunities.

Location 1838:

bank teller. They called it the “Fallacy

Location 1849:

Failing to prioritize stupidity over malice causes things like paranoia. Always assuming malice puts you at the center of everyone else’s world. This is an incredibly self-centered approach to life. In reality, for every act of malice, there is almost certainly far more ignorance, stupidity, and laziness.

Location 1900:

of all possible motives behind an action, the ones that require the least amount of energy to execute (such as ignorance or laziness) are more likely to occur than one that requires active malice.