best guys indeed!
if ur planning to prepare for AP, way to go

i'm deeply convinced that forcing business students to memorize the 7Ps and PESTLE frameworks to get an A is like killing creativity in a young artist through rigid art classes that dictate how art "should be" done.
never heard of Jobs or Altman taking consulting classes.

zero intuition, zero sense of messy reality.
that's how u accidentally manufacture mediocrity.

mental models: why smart people still make dumb decisions

1/2

"If you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries. You don’t have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it’s not that hard to do."
- Charlie Munger

there are certain universal truths that one can take advantage of. for example, velocity shows that both speed and direction matter. reciprocity reveals how being positive and taking initiative gets the world to do most of the work for you. Margin of Safety reminds that things don’t always go as planned. relativity exposes our blind spots and shows how a different perspective can reveal new information.

mental models can be quite useful tools to avoid being "a man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail." if you only know one way of thinking, you'll force every problem into that framework.

the thing is, your intuitions can be systematically wrong
your brain evolved for small tribe dynamics 50,000 years ago. it's terrible at:

exponential growth (you think linearly)
probability (you overweight recent vivid events)
compound interest (you don't get it intuitively)
incentives (you trust stated motives over structural forces)

models correct these built-in bugs. we like to believe we reason our way through life. in reality tho, most of the time we react.

going to 8th grade physics, think of inertia.
at its core, inertia is a property of mass. the more massive an object is, the more it resists changes to its state of motion. but it isn’t just a physical phenomenon. its an illuminating lens to see habits, beliefs, and our resistance to change. the longer we’ve held them, the larger the mass and the more force required to change them. the path of least resistance is always the status quo.
getting started is the hardest part. once something moves in a direction, keeping it in motion is much easier. thats why most self-­help books about positive habits break things down into very small steps - to reduce the force required to overcome the status quo. for example, if you want to get in the habit of doing push-­ups daily, start with one two rather than fifty. the bigger the mass - in this case, the gap between where you are and where you want to be - the more effort required.

inertia can be both a challenge and an opportunity. successful companies struggle with the inertia of their success and the resistance to change that comes with size, complexity, and entrenched interests. on the other hand, startups can leverage their lack of inertia - their agility, their willingness to pivot and adapt - as a competitive advantage.
momentum and inertia are closely related. while inertia is the tendency to resist change, momentum is the oomph an object has when it’s moving. the more momentum something has, the harder it is to stop or redirect. surely the point is to pick the right direction and build momentum so inertia works to your advantage and carries you forward. in essense its the concept of “flywheel” in business - success breeds success, and small wins compound into big gains.

2/2

or
leverage
leverage is the force multiplier of the world, the principle that allows the small to move the large and the few to influence the many. It’s the idea that a little force, strategically applied, can yield outsize outputs. think of a crowbar prying two boards apart or a pulley system hoisting a heavy load. in both cases, force is multiplied. but again, u can apply this outside of physics too. consider the author who took the ideas in their head, put them in a book, and sold millions of copies, or the Wall Street investor who made a single decision that resulted in billions. if we make it more personal, leverage is about identifying the key habits, skills, and relationships that will impact your life and work most. focusing your energy on the critical few rather than the trivial many. just getting a better quality sleep can be a good example. eight hours of real rest doesn’t just give you eight hours of energy the next day. it sharpens judgment, improves emotional regulation, increases patience, and lowers the threshold at which everything else falls apart. surely, leverage can easily work the other way around too. a small error, applied at scale or at the wrong point in the system, can do disproportionate damage.

the list goes on. natural selection from biology. critical mass. exponential growth (rich get richer, success feeds success) or the law of diminishing returns.
but models combine.
single causes rarely explain outcomes. it's the combination of those that makes sense

Coca-Cola's dominance:

operant conditioning (sugar + caffeine = chemical reward) + social proof (everyone drinks it) + brand association (billions linking Coke with happiness) + economies of scale (cheaper per unit at massive scale) + habit formation (daily consumption becomes automatic)

or 2008 financial crisis:

incentive bias (brokers paid for volume, not quality) + social proof ("everyone's buying houses") + complexity (derivatives nobody understood) + leverage (small moves amplified into huge losses) + feedback loops (falling prices leads t forced selling which leads to lower prices)

multiple models, same direction equals to lollapalooza effect.
u can think of the checklist like a pilot's pre-flight check:
the pilot doesn't check the fuel gauge to see if physics is real today. they do so cuz humans forget things. we get tunnel vision. we focus on the most salient factor and ignore others.
running through checklist forces you to ask:

"im excited about this startup idea (psychology: optimism bias), but what does the math say about market size?"
"this relationship feels right (psychology: infatuation), but what do incentives suggest about long-term alignment?"

surely u dont need to know it all to lead a normal life. but knowing more than 2-3 of these universal laws (most people stop here) can save from quite a bunch of silly mistakes and overall be able to see through things better.

learning how to think > learning what to think.

ahah
i know i packed up a lot in one post.

@summernotes

a random 3am (4 already) thought:

if you can feel bad without a reason even when everything’s going well, try feeling good without a reason even when not everything’s going well.

“your emotions only last 90 seconds Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor said the chemical rush of an emotion leaves your system in 90 secs. if you’re still angry after that it's cause you're choosing to stay in the loop by rethinking the same thoughts.”
- Steven Bartlett

“he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm’s money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”

being mean is not strength. not at this age, at least.

we’ve lived enough to know better. surely, we all carry scars and we have rebuilt ourselves in ways no one saw.
so when someone still hides in jealousy, gossip, or petty games, that’s anything but power. that’s a small person trying to feel important.
and yes, secure women don’t compete with other. they connect, support, and they have a heart big enough to understand that there’s space for everyone to win without having to tear down anyone.