Super Thinking

Introduction: The Latticework of Mental Models

In 1994, the investor Charlie Munger stood in front of a business-school audience at the University of Southern California and offered a piece of advice that sounds almost too plain to be useful. "You can't really know anything," he said, "if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form." His fix was to build that latticework out of mental models, and to steal them from every field you can reach. "When I urge a multidisciplinary approach," he later told a Stanford audience, "I'm really asking you to ignore jurisdictional boundaries."

That instruction is the seed of *Super Thinking*. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of the search engine DuckDuckGo, and Lauren McCann, a research statistician, define a mental model as a recurring concept that helps you explain, predict, or approach a situation. Once you have truly absorbed one, it hands you a reusable picture you can apply the next time something similar shows up. Munger guessed that "80 or 90 important models will carry about 90 percent of the freight" in making you a wise person, and the book sets out to assemble that toolkit, drawing on physics, biology, economics, statistics, and psychology.

A few models are so broadly useful that they slip free of the field that produced them. The authors call these "super models." Consider critical mass, a term from physics for the threshold amount of material needed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. The same idea explains why a quiet party suddenly comes alive, why a product tips into popularity, and why a ride-hailing service stalls in a new city until it finally has enough drivers to be reliable. Learn the model once, and you can use it almost anywhere. That habit of borrowing across borders is what the authors mean by "super thinking."