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Mental Model Club Guide

Mental Model Club Guide

Welcome to the Mental Model Club!

We have prepared A LOT of content and resources to help you think and do better in different aspects of your life and we organized it into several categories so you can find what you’re looking for more easily.

What Kind Of Content You Can Expect To See

Mental Models

Most of the pages with mental models follow the same structure:

  • Brief summary of the model
  • Mastery manuals vary in length, depending on the complexity of a specific model, and you can expect them to be anywhere from 40-120 pages long.
  • Live class recordings. Depending on the specific model, I did one, three, or more live classes to help students better understand the model and apply it more easily. If a specific model is particularly interesting to you I recommend watching the classes as well. But for the most part, you will get all the essential info in the manual so if you’re pressed with time, reading through the manuals is the 80/20 move.
  • Additional resources. This is where you can find the slides and other tools (for example, some models come with templates to help you practice applying them).
  • A list of related models is a quick way to view other models in the same category.
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The main place where you can find all of our mental models, categorized by topics, is here. Another place where you can find them is here, organized as a list.

Tools & Resources

Over the years, I’ve collected and developed a myriad of thinking and decision-making tools. In this category, I shared:

Profiles On & Interviews With The World’s Top Thinkers And Entrepreneurs

I was always interested in learning how successful people think so, so naturally, I studied them and, whenever I have the opportunity, I talk to them and interview them. That’s how I’m able to share with you:

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We’ve provided full manuals or transcripts for some profiles and interviews.

Dictionary Of Mental Models By Professional Roles

These aren’t full mental models but rather pointers—depending on your industry and role, some of these models can be really impactful for your progress. I gave a quick overview of each and if you find them interesting, you will have a good place to start your own research.

How To Take In The Material

The amount of content you will find can be overwhelming, especially if you’re new to this kind of thinking so I recommend having some kind of strategy as to how you will be taking it in.

First of all, I prepared a crash course on mental models so you understand what mental models actually are and how to use them.

Then, I wholeheartedly recommend starting with the two universal models in the Leverage category—The 80/20 Rule and Positive Feedback Loops. The reason for that is that they are universal and you can apply them either directly to your life or to other models that you’ll be exploring later. Even though understanding these models isn’t a prerequisite to understanding and applying the other models, these two models are powerful tools for making the most out of all others.

As for the rest of the models, this is how I recommend approaching them:

  1. Go through all models and tools and mark the ones that feel the most compelling
  2. Start with the most compelling one
  3. Depending on your own learning style and/or your current circumstances, you can decide to:
    1. Just familiarize yourself with one model by reading the mastery manual and then move on to familiarizing yourself with the next one(s). That way, you will have an idea of what each model is about so you can come back to them at a later time and take a deeper dive.
    2. If a model particularly resonates with you, you may want to decide that you want to go all-in and not get distracted by other models until you’ve mastered that one.

There is not one “right” way to absorb this content so whatever feels right is probably the right approach for you.

Troubleshooting Technical Glitches

The Mental Model Club is built on the platform called Notion. It’s an awesome and flexible platform that allows us to organize all the content in a way that other platforms don’t, but it can sometimes act funny for new users.

So, what could happen sometimes is that, for example, you don’t see a mastery manual displaying on a page, or another piece of the page looks broken. Troubleshooting this, although a bit annoying, is really simple: just refresh the page.

In most cases, refreshing it once will be enough, but occasionally you may need to do it two or three times. This will solve 99.9% of potential issues. In case it doesn’t, please let us know about the issue you’re experiencing at support@thoughtleader.school.

Take A Quick Video Tour Of The Club