Humans are prone to cognitive biases. Don’t rely on your intuition to make important decisions. Instead, understand the most common mental models to improve your thinking. Build your very own metacognition toolkit to face choices with a calm, informed mind.
Popular articles in this category include be careful of the optionality fallacy and the Occam’s razor fallacy, avoid falling prey to illusory correlations, use checklists when you can’t trust your brain. Learn about the curse of knowledge, The Cobra Effect, and Parkinson’s Law.
Ben Wisbey is the founder of Pylot, an innovative wearable to track your mental energy and help improve your productivity. We talked about the definition of mental energy and how it impacts our performance, accounting for fluctuating energy throughout the day, the results of their beta trials, and much more.
Stefanie Broes is the founder of Moonbird, the world’s first handheld breathing coach. In this interview, we talked about the benefits of slow breathing, how to use real-time biofeedback to regulate your nervous system, breathwork as a tool for stress management, and much more.
FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help people make the most of their minds. Jakob Storjohann is the CEO and founder of Ideamap, which is part of Ideanote. Ideamap is a visual workspace for brainstorming where teams collaborate on ideas and … Read More
Imagine two aspiring writers, both with the idea of establishing an online writing presence. The first writer, Alex, sets a fixed goal: they aim to grow their newsletter to 1000 subscribers by the end of the month. Alex has heard that consistency is key, so they choose a topic, decide on a format, block time … Read More
Imagine having a thinking partner that’s not just smart but also deeply attuned to your specific needs. This is the promise of a custom GPT model: an AI companion tailored to you, which can help you ideate, learn, and grow.
Chocolate or vanilla? Trello or Jira? Atom or VS Code? Stay in or go out? Should I click on this link or not? We make thousands of choices everyday, often automatically, using mental models we have created over years of experience. Decision-making is the process we use to identify and choose alternatives, producing a final … Read More
FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us make the most of our mind. Alan Chan is the co-founder of Heptabase, a visual note-taking tool that helps you learn complex topics. In this interview, we talked about the inherent dilemma of … Read More
In our age of information overload, writing is not just a means of expression. It’s a tool for clarity, comprehension, and connection. If metacognition is your compass, then writing is your map.
Despite the best intentions, a group of people make unwise decisions because of a collective desire to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions. In striving for conformity, there can be a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. This phenomenon is called “groupthink”. Here is a personal example. When arranging to meet up … Read More
The conventional path of accumulating optionality gives you reassuring but fragile options. In contrast, the best options — which involve lots of experimenting and tinkering — may feel riskier in the short term but will help you thrive through uncertainty.