I also have a mentor, and I can’t recommend that enough.Īnd I read. (Need one? Drop me a line and I’ll recommend you.) I pay them to help me think through these mental models, to help me understand where I need to watch for potholes. And he needs me, to be confident when it’s warranted. But I need him to do that, as much as I tease him. I’m not anxious or suspicious I always think the deal will go through. He’s the one that always spots the problems, the red flags. There’s this “negative Nelly” on my team. But I don’t have those, so I need to put other safeguards in place. You could also call my overconfidence “ optimism bias ” – essentially a “mistaken belief that our chances of experiencing negative events are lower and our chances of experiencing positive events are higher than those of our peers.” It’s like being a teenager – you just don’t quite understand that one mistake behind the wheel of a car can, in fact, leave you vulnerable.Īnger – or anxiety – could help me double-check that impulse. But as a friend of mine says, “you can never out give a giver, but you can never give a taker enough.” To believe my own story, believe in their potential, believe that they can fix this. If you have a problem situation with the client, it’s easier to tap into my capacity for joy and love. I’ve done this business for 23 years, so I have been right, 99% of the time, most years. In our business, we need to be right 99% of the time. Sometimes your story is so good, it’s hard not to fall for your own bulls**t. The biggest, for me, is confirmation bias. This leads me back to my story, and the two mental models – or biases – I struggle with most. (By the way, while the test I took isn’t available publicly, this one is similar. I answered a lot of questions, and it came up with a profile that confirmed what I suspected: while my empathy for others was through the roof, my access to my own feelings – particularly anger and anxiety – was very low. Not long ago, I took an emotional intelligence (“EQ”) test through my mentor. You can’t really use these tools until you know your own weaknesses – the biases you’re most prone to. “Once you have a name for something, you can spot it, and you can use it,” Gabriel Weinberg says in this great podcast about mental models. Think of mental models like cross-training your body in the gym, except you’re training your head. But you’re missing the island on the other side.įor example, did you know about “Hanlon’s razor” ? “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” I like that one. Sure, you can see pretty far on a clear day. Relying on one mental model – or the ones you know and grew up with – is like limiting your perspective to a single porthole on a ship. (The simplest answer is often the best!)īut you should never have just one. Occam’s razor, for example – we all know that one. You probably already have a few mental models in your head. I went with my gut, and my gut was wrong – because it was weighed down with cognitive biases I hadn’t considered. These are the potholes that using mental models can help us avoid. I saw what I wanted to see because I was too confident in my ability to spot problems, assess truth. I had fallen into two common traps: I was overconfident, and I had confirmation bias. I didn’t know he’d be the reason I’d have to talk to law enforcement. I didn’t know he’d go on to attempt the same fraud with someone else. I should have thrown him out of my office window. When he said he regretted it, that he wanted to change, I believed him – even though I had to fire him. I hadn’t helped him “unleash his potential” I would never do something like this, there must have been a mistake, he must have made a mistake. So when I found out he was complicit in fraud, I didn’t feel violated I didn’t feel angry. He was the definition of “team player you don’t worry about.” He showed up, he produced. He’d been there with me at the beginning. There was an employee I had worked with for a long time. “I should have thrown him out the window” Let me tell you a story about decisions, anxiety and anger, and biases. They’re what Charlie Munger calls “an operating system for life.” Something that’s repeatable, that lets us take our personal biases out of the question – or our deficiencies. Mental models – like this one – help us build those decisions on a framework. How should I react when someone lets me down? What do I wear? Does this email require my attention? Lately, though, I’ve been rethinking whether it’s an advantage – or whether it’s a liability, in ways I hadn’t really considered. It helped, too, when there were problems I didn’t overreact, didn’t let it keep me up at night. It certainly helped when I was building a company. That’s just how I’m wired I always thought it was a good thing, an advantage.
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