The Directed Life

Notes from Farnam Street’s Great Mental Models Volume 2

Date read: 1/22/2023

Success comes from asking how to work with the world instead of against it. (12)

Physics

Relativity

Everyone has a different perspective. Your perspective is relative to the person you are, position you’re in, lenses you’ve inherited / developed, etc.

Galileo’s fish thought experiment demonstrated that perspective always influences the reality we perceive. (25)

You’re seeing what nobody else sees which is valuable, Remember what you aren’t seeing: everyone else’s perspective. (26)

You will always have limitations to your frame of reference that you need to account for in an effort to better understand reality. (28)

The goal is to enlarge our perspective to be a closer representation of reality by removing some of the factors that cloud our judgement. (34)

Reciprocity

Look to develop win-win relationships. Remember Newton’s third law—every force exerted will have an equal and opposite force exerted onto it. (42)

When you act on things, they act on you. (44)

Why reciprocity matters: (51)

Life is an iterative and compounding game.

Getting somewhat over our tendency to loss-aversion: (52)

Start looking at outcomes in the aggregate instead of focusing on each unique situation.

Reciprocity can have a ripple effect: (58)

Small changes in your actions change your entire world.

Thermodynamics

The set of laws that explain randomness in systems and movement of energy.

The laws: (63-64)

• Conservation: Energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred through heat and work.
• Entropy: Energy unable to get used for work always increases. We have to expend energy to create order.
• Constancy: As temperature approaches absolute zero the system’s entropy approaches a constant.
• Zeroth: Assumption of the other laws that if two objects are in thermal equilibrium with another object then the two objects are in equilibrium with each other.

Why the laws matter: (64)

Entropy reminds us that energy is required to maintain order. You need to anticipate things falling apart and focus on prevention.

Closed systems move towards disorder. (77)

Stories can help maintain order. Core structures of stories include: (78)

• Equilibrium—disequilibrium—new equilibrium
• Journey there and back
• Someone looking for something and obstacles are in the way

Escaping equilibrium is difficult. Select an ecosystem where the equilibrium is your desired outcome. (82)

Inertia

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. It’s hard to start, but once you start and have momentum it becomes hard to stop.

Change necessitates force and force requires effort. (87)

Find the escape velocity for a desired action or outcome, the amount of effort needed to overcome resistance and set yourself on a new path. (96)

Friction and Viscosity

Aspects of the model: (106)

• What is easy in one environment may be hard in another
• Main relevant forces depend on the scale of operation

Lean manufacturing: environment is designed and improved to encourage innovation. (117)

Reducing resistance is easier than adding more force. (118)

Velocity

Constant velocity is when an object moves at a consistent speed in an unchanging direction. Reflect on your direction more than your speed. (123)

Develop expertise of the territory and then choose a path where you can maintain a constant velocity. (126)

You can move faster with better roads. (127)

• Be a road builder: write / create “roads” that put people on desirable paths, connecting their beliefs / knowledge to what you have to offer

Direction before speed: (130)

Better go the right direction slowly than the wrong direction with speed.

The usefulness of this idea: (132)

This is why having a direction is so important: it lets us evaluate the usefulness of what we are doing by giving us a measurement of where we want to go.

Leverage

It wasn’t until we developed tools that allowed us to leverage small changes in individual performance that we started to see a lot of variation in productivity. To take that further, if technology increasingly promotes variation in individual performance, then we can expect the gap between the most productive and least productive people in a society to increase over time. (139)

Leverage is best paired with reciprocity—building in win-win thinking helps you keep your leverage sustainable and achieve better, longer lasting, outcomes. (151)

Chemistry

Activation Energy

The energy required to initiate a reaction—bonds break and new bonds form. (159)

You need enough activation energy to power the reaction to its conclusion. (161)

Catalysts

Change accelerators that aren’t consumed by the reaction—removable and reusable. (177)

The printing press: (181)

The printing press acted as a catalyst to accelerate the process of obtaining knowledge … The printing press increased knowledge because it broadened the conditions in which the reaction could occur.

Autocatalysis: the outputs of a reaction are the same required inputs for starting it and the reaction becomes self-sustaining. (185)

Alloying

Combining components to create something unachievable by the individual elements alone. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts; 1+1 can equal 10. (193-194)

Knowledge is the ultimate alloy. The component parts get filtered through you; your thoughts and perceptions of the knowledge combine in a unique way. (198)

The components of knowledge, according to Aristotle, that combine and define your understanding of any topic or situation: (198)

• scientific (episteme)
• art / craft (techne)
• prudential / practical (phronesis)
• intellectual / intuitive (nous)
• wisdom (sophia)

Leonardo da Vinci is a prime example of allowing characteristic of knowledge: intensely curious and observant, lifelong learner, dialogue between experiment and theory. (200-201)

Imagining what can be drives you to validate what actually exists and then to apply the investigative rigor to see if you can bridge the two … We start with what we get in terms of genetics and environment, but at a certain point we take control of what we become. (201)

Combining a deep specialized knowledge in a domain with a broader understanding of the rules that govern the physical world is a rare combination that saves you time, money, and problems. (203)

Biology

Evolution: Natural Selection

Animals adapt to the environment. Frequency of differing traits change in response to environment change.

A species will become more and more tuned to the precise adaptations in needs to survive … while the best adapted organisms may be the strongest during normal conditions, they may struggle to survive volatility. Generalist species are far more resilient than specialists. A rat or a cockroach can survive almost anywhere, a panda less so. (216)

Evolution: Adaptation

On the human timescale, adaptability is about recognizing when the way you have done things in the past is becoming less and less successful in a changing environment. It requires you to innovate, like mutations in the evolution timescale, to see if you can come up with ideas that will improve your chance of success. (233)

Red Queen Effect: least fit of species dies first; you can never stop adapting because you’ll lose your competition position. (235)

Exaptation is flexibility: you want to develop a diverse toolkit because you don’t know for certainty which tools will be most valuable until a situation presents itself. (248)

Ecosystem

A web of interaction supports the holistic system. The environment changes similar to how individual species must adapt.

Resilience: speed of recovery following disturbance. Aim for robustness and resilience (259-260).

Learn the components of a system to develop an understanding of how your actions may impact the system’s connections and outcomes (270).

Niches

Gause’s Law: it’s impossible for perfect competition between two species requiring the same resources to survive in the same niche. One species will find an increasingly specialized niche, or a slight advantage becomes major and one of the species gets wiped out. (279)

An ecosystem is comprised of niches … there is a trade-off between specialization—dominating a smaller niche—and generalization, occupying a larger niche. Specialists have less competition and stress, but only in times of stability. Generalists face a greater day-to-day challenge for resources and survival but have more flexibility to respond when times change. (291)

Self-Preservation

Writing preserves a record of who we are: (303)

Preserving knowledge allows us to transfer it more easily, supporting the preservation of the species.

We have self-preservation instincts that sometime harm us because it makes it more difficult to think about surviving / thriving in the long term. However, our ideas of self-preservation give our lives meaning / identity. (307)

Replication

Closed systems, those without any new inputs, die in changing environments. (313)

The more something gets copies the more it weakens. (315)

The replication sweet spot: (315, 317)

The components have to be rigid enough to be easily copied but flexible enough to adapt to inevitable changes.

The environment always changes, which is why successful replication has a bit of flexibility built in.

Effective replication: (323)

Effective replication requires enough structure and space to produce a copy, but enough flexibility to adapt that copy to changes in the environment.

Cooperation

Shared beliefs help us cooperate in complex systems.

Hierarchical Organization

We almost always fall into hierarchical structures. We use status symbols to convey ‘pecking order’ / position in hierarchy.

Incentives

Incentives are powerful driving forces and key elements to changing situations.

The ability to store things such as fat or food gives us flexibility in responding to incentives. Money can be thought of as a form of storage—all the potential purchasing power is stored until used to buy things. (362)

Impacts from incentives have pond-ripple like effects. (364)

We don’t like cognitive dissonance—if we have ideas that malign, we rationalize as to why this could be and try to align them, often forgetting we’re incentive-driven and the malignancy is coming from a strongly held belief vs. action from incentive. (370)

We need not blindly follow incentives if they don’t align with our values. (373)

Tendency to Minimize Energy Output

We are prone to laziness in action and thought. We rely on our emotions to think for us because if we were purely rational we would be driven mad.

Kahneman’s advice for correcting heuristics: (383)

• remember base rates
• assess quality of information

We need to develop mechanisms that promote efficiency in the ongoing, repetitive activities we undertake every day. (383)

Experience doesn’t become learning without reflection, and reflection is an energy expenditure. If we want to develop our thinking and get the most out of our environments, then we have to be aware of the natural tendency to minimize energy output and correct for it where doing so creates value. (387)

Supporting Ideas

• Competition: We compete for finite resources like food, mates, and territory. This forces improvements Competition is the reason for the great diversity in the world.
• Dunbar’s Number: You can only form close relationships with so many people, and the closer the relationship the less people you can have that type of relationship with.

Putting it all together

While most people assume that experience is the key to learning, the key is actually reflection. (389)