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Mental Models For Writers
The United States Navy SEALs go through some of the most intense and rigorous training you can think of. The dropout rate in basic training is pretty high. Over the years, the Navy found that those who succeed are not the ones who can focus on the big picture, but the ones who can micro-focus.
While crawling through mud with barbed wire fences over you, and there’s a thunderstorm, and it’s raining like cats and dogs, recruits who have the ability to micro-focus, that moving one arm and then the other are the ones who survive the boot camp.
Micro-focusing can be applied to writing as well. If you are stuck in a murky middle of your book, focusing on writing one sentence at a time and then following it with another one can help you power through.
So many things become really easy when explained with an analogy or some law or concept. This kind of analogy, or a model that can help change a mindset, is called a mental model.
A mental model are concepts that can be used to explain things. They can be a framework or worldview that you can wear on your head like a hat that can help interpret the world and understand the relationship between things.
Mental Models Are The Tools of Thinkers and Successful People.
Mental models have been around for a long time. They are widely used in economics. Supply and demand is a mental model that helps understand how the economy works. Game theory describes how relationships and trust work. Entropy explains how disorder and decay work.
Some call them “apps for the mind.” We use many in day-to-day decision making, problem-solving, and truth-seeking. Here are some familiar ones:
Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
Pareto’s Principle — “For many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.”
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) — “A pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.”
Butterfly Effect — “The concept that small causes can have large effects.”
