Mental Models

“To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

The mistake is thinking of “important” and “urgent” as synonymous and not realizing the huge gulf of difference between the two terms and how you should prioritize them. The ability to distinguish the two is a key step in lowering your anxiety, stopping procrastination, and making sure that you are acting in an optimized way.

Visualize all the dominoes, otherwise known as second-order thinking.
This is simply trying to project into the future and extrapolate a range of consequences that you can use to conduct a cost-benefit analysis for your decisions or solutions

Just because something appears to demand a quick response doesn’t mean you should give it, and just because something is slowly ticking in the background doesn’t mean you should ignore it

Urgent task: These simply demand immediacy and speed, and usually come from other people.

Hanlon’s Razor forces you to take your offended ego out of a situation and analyze it with everyone’s best intentions in mind.

Empathy is a mental model in itself.

Relying on humans is not a smart move because humans are, by and large, careless idiots—myself absolutely included.

Etorre’s Observation: The other line always moves faster

We’re a lazy species that doesn’t want to do anymore than what is necessary at the present moment.