Acquiring Wisdom

• Master the best of what other people have figured out.
• The person with the fewest blindspots wins because they are closer to reality. Avoid problems in the first place.
• Mental models describe the way the world works, they are how we think and reason, they are a representation of how something works, they are essential to making rational decisions.
• Mental models help us minimize risk by understanding the forces that are at play, creating less stress and more freedom.
• You must break down the parts of a problem if you want to solve it.
• Being able to accurately describe the full scope of a situation is the first step to understanding it.
• Mental models provide us with many different lenses to look at a problem with
• The more lenses used on a given problem → the more reality reveals itself → the more we understand → the more we know what to do
• When understanding is separated from reality, we lose our powers
• It's hard to understand a system we're a part of since we can't see what we aren't looking for
• You need to keep checking the extent to which you understand reality to be certain you understand properly. This is a continuous process, one that will never end.
• We fail to update from interacting with reality for three core reasons:
  1. Not having the right perspective
     • We have a hard time seeing any system that we are in
     • In order to truly understand our reality we must take on many different perspectives
  2. Ego-induced denial
     • We have too much invested in our opinions of ourselves to see the world's feedback
     • Often times we don't release ideas into the world for fear of protecting our Ego
  3. Distance from the consequences of our decisions
     • The further we are from the results of our decisions, the easier it is to keep our current views rather than update them
     • If we're far from the feedback of the decisions we make, it becomes easy to convince ourselves we are right and avoid the challenge of updating our views
• "A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake" — Confucius
• notice things which "easily escape attention" and ask why things happen
• simple ideas are of great value because they can help us prevent complex problems
• The universe works the same way wherever you are in it
• There are other more powerful ways to prevent being replaced than knowing the most complex stuff. First, just be able to apply fundamental principles well.
• "prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities"
• Elementary ideas help us understand the interconnections of the world, and see it for how it really is. They also allow us to match patterns, which allow us to draw analogies.