Every Ph.D. student at Princeton and MIT is brilliant. It's not raw intelligence that separates you from others. It's the way you see the problem. You need a broader set of mental models.

What Mental Models Are

• Concepts, frameworks, or worldviews that you carry around in your mind to help you interpret the world and understand the relationship between things
• Deeply held beliefs about how the world works
• Mental models guide your perception and behavior
• The thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems.
• Learning a new mental model gives you a new way to see the world—like Richard Feynman learning a new math technique.
• The best mental models are the ideas with the most utility - broadly useful in daily life to make wiser choices and take better actions
• When a certain worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to explain every problem you face through that worldview.
  • "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" -Chinese proverb

There are mental models for general thinking, economics, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics…

Mental Models

All perspectives hold some truth. None of them contain the complete truth.

Mental Models Table