Make Big Decisions

The most important skill anybody can learn is the ability to learn rare and useful skills on-demand. Across warfare, AI, learning sciences, business, philosophy and animal intelligence, there is almost the same exact loop. I call this the Learning Loop mental model, and it is the fundamental learning process of the universe.

Research shows that when we teach what we learn, we learn faster. This is known as the Explanation Effect and it even applies when we teach concepts to ourselves by journaling, mind mapping, or talking out loud.

When you have a good mental model that gives you a way of doing the research efficiently, one focused hour of effort can yield gems. The Knowledge Mining model shows how to do research that brings us more growth and more profit.

The ultimate sign of mastery is being world-class in what you do automatically. This model will help you understand how to go from conscious competence to unconscious competence to leverage the power of intuition.

Connecting your brain with other people’s in the right way is multiplicative, not additive. Using network science research, learn how to filter who to build deep relationships with and how to rapidly build deep relationships built on mutual growth.

A digital garden is a public repository where you share your sawdust. In this manual, we’ll take a deeper look into digital gardens and do a step-by-step walkthrough of one of the apps that make them possible.

Rather than one specific model, the Sculpting Success model is more of a supermodel. It is designed to help you answer the following question about career success and life impact: Given that we all have the same amount of hours in a day, what makes the most successful people in the world create so much more wealth and impact (sometimes a million times more) than others?

We live in a culture that celebrates abundance. The idea of “more is better” is everywhere around us—in food, clothes, apps, information, possessions, money, and more. Therefore we tend to think of addition as a key to our definition of success. But there’s a paradox at work that we almost never hear about. Sometimes, we get more value, success, and results when we subtract rather than add.

Recent research from the field of AI makes the case that, to accomplish something big, you do NOT set ambitious goals and then work backwards. Rather, follow the stepping stones right in front of you that give you the most novel paths forward, even if you aren’t sure exactly how that stepping stone will pay off in the future. From that new stepping stone, you look for the most novel path forward again.

We’ve all heard about goal setting and some of the most common techniques (for instance, SMART goals and BHAGs). In this Mastery Manual, we’re going several layers deeper and we’re also looking at the new research within the field of goal theory, and some of that research overturns previously held conventional wisdom. Read this manual to learn all about it.

What should you learn next? One of the reasons this question is so difficult to answer is because the choices are literally endless. The Multiplier Skills Mental Model gives you a formula for choosing what learning hurdle to conquer next.

The Subtraction Learning Method is the mental model Success By Subtraction applied to learning. It’s one of the most useful mental models but, as it often happens, it can be challenging to apply it. That’s why we did a series of 3 classes to help you practice this method and we organized a 7-day learning challenge that you can now do on your own.

Selling Your Sawdust is the process of turning the by-products of your learning process that you’d normally throw away (which, in my experience, is over 90% of notes) into products that can be valuable to other people.

When it comes to being a world-class entrepreneur or scientist, being a polymath might actually be the rule rather than the exception. Learn how to enjoy the benefits of being a polymath while avoiding the disadvantages.

We live in an age of opportunity shock—too many opportunities, too little time. This model helps you decide what to do when there’s a new opportunity that could potentially be huge but you’re busy and you don’t want to waste time pursuing a flop.

When it comes to mastering a skill, it’s more practical to think 100 hours, not 10,000. By picking the right micro-skills and stacking them, you can reach mastery 100x faster and continue building success upon success.

Quick introduction to mental models and their usefulness.

Michael’s article on most useful and universal mental models with an infographic.

Learn how to get the most from your membership.

As we're moving into this increasingly changed future, in which we seem to be living out Ray Kurzweil’s Law Of Accelerating Returns, we’ve noticed that the opportunity follows certain patterns. In this manual, we discuss six principles of opportunity to help you build a model of how it works and how it evolves through time.

When you have a product or you're buying a product, you can look at it through the metaphor of your hiring the person to do a job for you, and that job could have functional aspects and emotional aspects.

The offer isn’t the only thing that makes something sell. A lot of times, especially in a smaller company or startup, a lot of what people are buying is not just the product — in many ways, they are buying you. So in this manual, we’re going to talk about selling you.

When it comes to rapidly changing environments, forget the 10,000-Hour Rule. Thomas Edison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and other great innovators follow the 10,000-Experiment Rule, and you can start with it with the help of this manual.

The rookie mistake many business owners make in their marketing is to just promote themself. Instead, you should work on educating your prospects. Once you educate them on how things work in your domain and what it’s like to work with you, they’re more likely to develop trust in you and buy your products or services.

How can I get in front of as many eyes as possible and get as many people as I can to know about my work, my projects, and the services or products I offer, all with minimal costs? That’s the challenge this model addresses.

“Think like a customer” is a simple idea/skill, and it’s also the key skill you need in order to get customers. In order to create a product people want and market it in a way people understand, you first have to understand the customer. This manual will help you understand how.

To communicate effectively within someone in a buying state, we need to understand who our buyers are and what makes them unique and identify their #1 specific psychological-emotional motivator. In other words, we want to identify our specific buyers’ hot buttons.

Maybe you’re already familiar with the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, which states that 20% of inputs create 80% of outputs. This guide is probably the most condensed and in-depth explanation of the 80/20 rule that has ever been created. It features 5 application strategies, many life hacks that you can copy, and 5 live workshops so you can really internalize this model and use it in literally every area of life.

You can think of positive feedback loops as a chain reaction of dominoes falling, gaining momentum, and becoming exponentially larger over time until they knock over the final “goal” domino with your money, business, health, learning, and relationships. They show us that small, consistent actions can create results that resemble linear progress at first—until they spike exponentially, creating virtually guaranteed, mega results.

Rugh draft of models related to futurism

List of top books on habit forming.

MIT researchers discovered a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that consists of three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward.

One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top.

The Fogg Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt.

In this session, we’re going to talk about examples of reinvention and get a sense of what reinvention looks like.

We’re discussing reinventing learning itself. What does it really mean to learn and to reinvent learning in our lives?

In this session, we’re discussing initiation and crossing the threshold into your transformation and into your reinvention.

In this session, we’re discussing reinventing in the emotional and social domain.

In this session, we're talking about reinvention with a capital R. The big reinvention.

In this session, we're going to reinvent value itself.

In this session we're focusing on reinventing our thinking.

We’re discussing the idea of "me", getting in touch with your unique gifts, and then revisioning them and reinventing them for higher purposes.

There are three different worlds and the laws in one world won’t necessarily apply in other worlds.

There are two patterns or principles or forces of self - kind of like yin and yang, or what I would call agency and communion.

Self-design, in both senses: we’re designing ourselves and we’re doing it ourselves. And to do self-design, you have to get some meta-cognition.

In this session, we’re reinventing our productivity and we’re starting to move more into the outer game, into interacting with the world.

When you're going through a reinvention, you're literally "dying into" another version of yourself.

Why and how you should be reinventing yourself with the customers, your marketing, and your product.

We're going to learn about how to reinvent ourselves personally and professionally, in our business, in our personal life and literally all through our lives.

Identifying what you value is one of the highest leverage things that you can do as a person. It's incredibly important to identify what you value, and also, to identify how you value things. In this manual, we will talk about value, how to identify your values, how to value things, and how to get more value in your life and in your business.

This model will help you understand how to adapt better, how to turn change and adversity into success, and what that can mean for your life. This mental model can (and should) be applied across domains, from personal to professional, to increase your ability to not only survive, but to thrive through change and stressors.

Often, when we talk about adopting and developing skills, we think of math, spelling, riding a bike, driving, or learning a foreign language. But the transformation in areas like dating, thriving in marriage, writing a book, starting a business, requires a different type of change, a different type than knowing nine times nine, or remembering a formula. Transformation is a radical shift at the identity level and we are dissecting it in this manual.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The Janus Skills model is a unique combination of extremely useful and extremely rare. It is counterintuitive and is literally the opposite of conventional wisdom.

The idea behind reinvention is that you can take all of your skills, knowledge, relationships, stories, and resources, like puzzle pieces, and put them together in a new way to create value on a higher level than you hadn't even considered before and to open a pathway forward and upward in your life. In short, you can learn this skill and master it.

We've been refusing the call to become our greatest selves, to take care of this planet, to really think through what we're going to do if there's a major problem. Now we've been pushed over the threshold by the pandemic, and we are now going on what is probably the first collective Hero's Journey that we've been on.

This month we're learning about development and developmental models. Development is interesting and important because once you understand this model, you have a sense of how to go to the next level in life. You start to understand transformation and reinvention, and how to really achieve things in a highly leveraged way.

Life organizes itself into emergent levels and developmental psychology theorists tell us that this set of emergent orders also governs psychological development. We go through orders of development that transcend and include the previous orders. This is important because in situations where everything looks like it's about to break down, often it’s an emergence that’s about to happen, a breakthrough to a higher order of complexity.

When we think about adding some new task to our life, we usually feel like we don’t have the time to do it. As we look at our day, it’s completely packed. But if you look at your time from a fractal perspective, a pattern that you notice is that at different levels, whether it’s a work session, a workday, or workweek or a decade, there’s often naturally these ebbs and flows of working hard and then relaxation that we could fit in.

Here you can find the results of my research on problem-solving. This 63-pages long document contains my organized notes and within them, you can find key terminology, best resources, highlights, top 1% thought leaders to follow, and how-to info to help you apply the ideas.

The Wisdom Wheel is a method for solving problems that uses humanity’s collective wisdom instead of relying solely on our own thinking and on trial and error.

In many ways, humans are designed for social conformity. Conforming is easier, and it works 99% of the time. An original thinker, however, knows that social and expert authority is often right, but that it can also be incredibly wrong too. So, the original thinker looks for holes in the consensus view and capitalizes on them. This model shows how you can do it too.

Humans have evolved over tens of thousands of years in an environment that is very different than the one we live in now. During this process, we developed unconscious biases which helped us survive in those tough environments, but can hinder us in today’s modern society. By recognizing those biases we can make infinitely better decisions.

The Fundamental Attribution Error states that when we try to explain other people’s bad behavior, we tend to overemphasize their personality and underemphasize the situation they were in. This leaves people feeling unappreciated and destroys relationships. It can lead to a chain reaction of frustration, disengagement, subpar performance, further judgment, toxicity, and ultimately parting ways.

Most of the time when we say “insight,” we’re referring to realizations we have, often related to our relationships or personal lives. These insights are great but for this manual, we’re talking about market-based insights, where “market” is about building products, services, art, or ideas that people give their money or attention to.

Dr Paul MacLean, the author of the Triune Brain Theory, was a neuroscientist who discovered that, basically, our brain is a three-nested organ. Having this model in mind can help us move through the world by de-composing a situation and looking at it through different lenses, each corresponding to a different reality.

There are consequences to each action, and there are consequences to consequences. These are called Second-Order Effects. Ultimately, it’s impossible to predict all the consequences perfectly, but some of them are really predictable, and the better of a model you have, the better you'll be prepared to notice the opportunity in your industry.

When most people think about scenarios, they either think only about the positive scenarios (if they’re setting a goal), or only about the negative outcomes (if they’re in worry mode), and they usually focus only on the short term. With scenario planning, you expand your perspectives by thinking about both the positive and negative and by extending into the long term.

Polarity Map is a simple model. When you're talking about an issue, there are always two sides, and there's a pro and con to each side. However, on each issue where there's a polarity, the opportunity is to see both sides of the polarity. It’s about collecting information, being open to hearing “the other side,” and actually being actively open-minded by going out and searching for opposing perspectives.

When thinking about creating their own course, most people envision a huge million-dollar course that takes time and money to create. In this manual, I’m making the case that by making things—including courses—smaller you actually get a lot more (and different) benefits.

There is huge money being made in the knowledge economy but most of it is going to platforms rather than creators. However, today, blockchain technology and Web 3.0 are setting a foundation to rethink how we make money. From a mental model perspective, these shifts force you to change your models and evolve them.

Rather than the typical approach of writing long forms and getting everything out of your head, the Quotable Creator approach is more about writing one really good sentence at a time and practicing creating a sentence so good that others would regularly share it; then adding the next sentence, the next one, and so on.

A trademark idea is a word that you coin that becomes a centerpiece of your thought leadership that you become known for, and people start using it in their life. This manual walks you through the process of developing your trademark ideas.

In many ways, if you're a better communicator but not as much of an expert, you'll probably be more successful in business and get more customers than someone who's a better expert but terrible at communication. One might even argue that your survival as a business owner depends on your ability to communicate online and that mastering that skill is in the 80/20 of running a successful business.

As visual thinking is a huge area, in this manual we focus on scratching the surface and helping you develop the 80/20 of visual thinking skills for thought leaders. That means we will learn about turning sentences (quotes) into visuals, and build from there.

One of the big challenges for thought leaders is how to process all the knowledge we collected and present it in a way that’s systematic and beneficial to both us and the people we share it with. That’s what the Idea Value Chain model aims to solve.

This model of Idea Machine has technology as a big part of it and that’s because we are in a period of unprecedented change driven by technology. Rapid change is confusing for most people and that gives an opportunity to thought leaders to see the meteors coming and to think and talk about them in advance. As the change comes you could be the thought leader who contextualizes the change and explains what's happening.

Maximize your work sessions.

Michael’s bedtime habits

Here, you can find the results of my research on aging. This 92-pages long document contains my organized notes and within them, you can find key terminology, best resources, highlights, top 1% thought leaders to follow, and how-to info to help you apply the ideas.

Increasingly, thought leadership is becoming an important aspect of career success, whether you’re an employee or an entrepreneur. The steps we present in this mastery manual are ultimately the 20% of skills that will give you 80% of results as a thought leader. It’s essential to be at least competent in each of the skills.

Articles on open source

Overview of digitization second-order effects.

Michael’s article on The Great Digitization

Accelerationism or hurry sickness happens when technology evolves faster than our ability to cope with it.

Overview of top models for coaches

Overview of top models for project managers

Over his 70-year career, Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s long-time business partner) has been recognizing cognitive biases and applying them to his decision-making. The end result are the biases below, which we excerpted and condensed from several of Munger’s speeches.

Overview of top models for designers and UX

Overview of top models for investors

Bridgewater Associates is the largest hedge fund in the world ($150 billion assets under management). It was founded by billionaire investor Ray Dalio who founded the company in 1975. Bridgewater has 1,500+ employees and in the document linked below you can find the “dictionary” of principles used in this organization.

Overview of top models for managers

Overview of top models for marketers

Overview of top models for pharmacists and scientists

Overview of top models for product managers

Overview of top models for founders & leaders

Rather than write Musk off for his troubled recent behavior, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves what mental models he uses to dream big, stay resilient, and supercharge his learning to reach so many seemingly crazy goals.

Overview of top models for teachers

Overview of top models for sales

Is a long-term time horizon is actually a universally powerful and foundational life and business strategy that we should all adopt? To get a deeper answer, I read every shareholder letter that Bezos has written, every annual report from Amazon.com, and nearly every interview that Bezos has done over the last 20 years.

Overview of top models for military

Nassim Taleb is an important person to read and follow right now because, for his entire career, he predicted, prepared for, and has helped others prepare for events like the ones we've been experiencing for the past few years.

This model aims to help you get published on top sites in your niche, write articles that go viral, build your business completely off of content (if you want), get people knocking on your door to work with you, and scale the number of people you reach.

Customer focus is a series of four models rather than a standalone model, and Total Customer Focus model is one of the cornerstones.

Making a decision requires taking literally unimaginable risks as we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, in a month, in a year, in 10 years. When you make a decision, you alter the path of time and causality. You push over a domino that has a whole bunch of other dominoes branching out in front of it that branch out, and you can't see most of the branches. In this manual, we will take a look at the mindset of decision-making, particularly as it relates to making big decisions in a world with unprecedented uncertainty.

Tech tracker to make future predictions

Michael’s morning habits