Our 14-year-old hustled us a bit recently, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

He had been lobbying to start receiving a weekly allowance. The requested sum was very modest, as in count-on-ten-fingers modest, and he is, truth be told and all modesty aside, a damn good kid. So. my wife and I were happy to agree. Though, as members of the global parent community, we felt duty bound to appear to put up a fight about the amount.

This is what we parents do, right? We wince a bit, considering the financial outlay, and adopt an expression that says we are trying to figure out if we can possibly find room in the tightly controlled family budget, and we are considering the hard choices we will have to make. We point out the obvious to our child: that it is a lot of money.

I also managed to sneak in what I thought was a clever life lesson. I pointed out that he was choosing to move to a salary model, rather than the freelancer pay structure we had been working with (i.e., previously paying him for a few of the bigger tasks and projects he took on, those that went beyond standard chores he wasn’t paid for).

As a salaried man, he would no longer be getting the windfall paydays he was used to receiving for putting in overtime. Just like in adult life. And this is the point where he revealed that he was way ahead of dad and his thinking was well beyond my touching lesson about the different ways adults are paid for work.

Because he had already thought all of this through. He had made the calculations. He had compared the amount of money we typically paid him for the one-off jobs during the year versus what he would make for the modest weekly sum multiplied fifty-two times, and he was confident he would come out ahead. This was the whole reason he wanted the allowance.

Besides, he added, he had just assembled two Ikea dressers that he was paid separately for, and he was confident that would be it for Ikea purchases for awhile. Also, spring had finally arrived in Minnesota, meaning there would be no chance of the extra big snows that sometimes result in ad hoc payments.

Dude—good thinking!

As I don’t need to tell you, anyone who can manage that sort of crafty, calculating, highly-rational, cost-benefity thinking is on track to do okay navigating our famously dog-eat-dog adult world where practical savvy goes a long, long way.

I was actually basking in some parental pride over the kid’s smarts, probably falling for a bit of the tendency to chalk the evidence of intelligence to natural gifts, when it hit me: the kid was outthinking me in part using tools I have been teaching him. So, I can counter my mild insecurity that he will soon really be leaving me in his intellectual dust, as he can already do physically. I can actually claim some credit for his mental advancement. That is some solace/

Not only that, the way in which I deserve some credit for his display of methodical cleverness actually had to the do with the new post I was working on for my newsletter/website thing. The post I was writing makes the case for taking a more direct approach to teaching our kids thinking, ways to teach thinking that may be more effective than the indirect methods favored by K-12.

That post, the one that explores different strategies for improving thinking in our kids, as well as ourselves, that post is this post, and the exchange with my son over allowance had, like that, become the opening.

Thinking about thinking

Shane Parrish was just out of university and working in a branch of Canadian national security in the wake of 9/11 when he had an epiphany.

Parrish, along with his colleagues, had been tasked with the challenge of doing his part to comb through endless streams of data in order to try to make decisions that would help eliminate potential future unknown terrorist events from occurring.

It is not hard to imagine the stress that came with the job. And it was amidst doing all he could to carry out his high stakes work that Shane Parrish realized: he had never actually been taught the skill that was so critically necessary to carry out his role successfully.

And what was this skill that the various esteemed educational institutions he attended had somehow omitted to teach Parrish in a way that he could confidentally protect national security? Shane Parrish realized he hadn’t really been taught how to think.

This will sound odd for many. We all, on some level, clearly know how to think. And learning thinking is implicitly tied up in all the learning that we do throughout school and life. All learning must be on some level a matter of learning more thinking. It is vertigo inducing to try to imagine otherwise.

But thinking, despite how central it is to everything we do, is typically not taught head on. We don’t grow up taking classes in effective thinking.

Think about that for a moment. It arguably is the point of much education, learning effective thinking, and yet the entire design of K-12 and beyond is to teach thinking indirectly—learning to think via learning how to analyze poems, learning through memorizing the year that trench warfare was first used in WWI, etc.

For Shane Parrish, who was suddenly bearing some responsibility for the safety of fellow Canadians in a time of great uncertainty and threat, this approach didn’t seem sufficient. Given the stakes, Parrish, felt he had a responsibility to pursue a path to steadily better, more effective, more systematic thinking, which is what he did through a lot of reading, researching, and writing on the topic.

It turns out that Parrish wasn’t the only one who was interested in the notion of learning more effective thinking. As he started reading widely in the topic, he began writing a blog about what he was learning, which steadily built up a following, with the vast majority of early readers coming from the ranks of Wall Street and venture capitalists, people responsible for protecting (and growing) large sums of money (this group made up 80 percent of his early readers).

I want to raise my hand here and wave it a bit on behalf of parents. Shane! Shane! Over here! While we may not be as attention-grabbing as his financier followers (one of whom suggested in a New York Times profile that he occasionally sends Parrish a random check in appreciation for the improvements Parrish’s writing have had on his thinking, and thus ability to make more money), parents too have a lot invested in how humans learn to think.

In the case of parents, we are not focussed on protecting a nation or billions of other people’s dollars, but instead on the developing minds we are responsible for. Another difference is that our interest in developing thinking isn’t as much a matter of our own thinking as that of our kids. We need their minds to develop well so they will be sufficiently successful that they will on the occasional cruise in our dotage, rather than rely on us to still pay their phone bills as they hit 40.

As a parent watching my kids make their ways through K-12, watching the random things they are being taught and the ways they are being taught (or not taught—my daughter’s math teacher has totally lost control of the class, to the point teacher just sequesters my daughter and the other well behaved kids in a separate room, tells them to teach themselves, while they can her dealing with the mayhem in the other room), I am less than confident great thinking is being taught.

Fortunately, I stumbled across Shane Parrish, whose quest to upgrade his thinking brought him into contact with some concepts that, it turns out, are well suited for developing the thinking of kids. Parrish’s own breakthrough, though, was actually not a result of his own thinking, but was instead a matter of discovering the life’s work of someone else—yet another person who had become obsessed with thinking about thinking and how to optimize it.

Enter Munger and the models

Everything changed for Sean Parrish when his quest to deconstruct thinking and how to best learn how to do it brought him to the writings and thinking of Charlie Munger. Munger is billionaire investment guru rock star money-making god Warren Buffett’s lesser known business parter (think drummer Alex Van Halen to his late brother, lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen).

Together the two old white homies are responsible for what most agree is the greatest run of investment success in history of money. Shares of Berkshire have risen 2,419,000% since 1965. Achieving those sort of outsize results is not something that happens by thinking like the average Joe. Instead, achieving such staggering success is in part is a matter of out-thinking the herd.

As Shane Parrish learned, Charlie Munger credits mental models for a significant portion of his ability to think well. (Warren Buffett, for his part, has commented publicly on the quality of Munger’s thinking, marveling at the speed at which Munger can analyze nearly any complex situations in seconds.)

Mental models. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, mental models are, at their most general, thinking tools—specific thinking processes that have been proven to be effective to help analyze complex situations, solve problems, make decisions, plan strategically, and eliminate blindspots.

Charlie Munger has said that he has approximately a hundred different models in his mind that he turns to as the appropriate opportunity arises. That is as opposed to the two mental tools that the most of us in the herd typically turn to: gut instinct and asking the internet.

Shane Parrish was so taken with the ways in which Munger’s ideas on mental models and related insights about thinking helped him in his quest to improve his thinking that he named his blog and company after the street on which the Berkshire Hathaway offices reside: Farnam Street.

Mental models are often based on concepts that originate in a specific field, like physics, but they become a mental model when they are shown to be useful beyond that unique circumstance in which they were originally used. As with most tools, different mental models prove useful for different circumstances.

One other salient aspect of mental models is that they are challenging to describe in the abstract. They are the sort of thing that the human mind eventually is just desperate to have a tangible example of in order to finally experience a moment of: oh, I get it. Which brings us to the next section.

The map is not the territory, for example

Maps are of course not synonymous with the area they are representing. In order to be smaller than the original, details must be left out.

A globe, for instance, has to omit some of the planet it is representing. You get a sense for the oceans, continents, countries, etc., but it is definitely doesn’t provide all relevant information about the planet. Like, the location of your house. To really represent everything, it would need to be the actual size of the Earth, at which point it has completely lost its usefulness.

Picture a globe that is at 1-to-1 scale riding along on top of the Earth and how odd that would look from space. Not smart.

So where, you ask (you, or perhaps another reader), is the mental model in that? What of it? Where is great insight that will upgrade my thinking and that of my kid? How does this help me tap into those 2,419,000% returns in the stock market?

Where this model becomes valuable is when we take it and apply it to situations beyond the world of maps and use its insights to improve our thinking. Which brings us to an example for illustration.

Most of us have been in meetings that involved PowerPoint presentations and many of those presentations have included data points represented graphically. Maybe it was an awesome bar graph. Perhaps a groovy multi-colored piechart. For those working at more sophisticated employers, there were data visualizations made with Tabeleu.

No matter how attractive the images, they were not reality. They were only a map. And the problem with maps is that our brains so love short cuts (or heuristics for the vocabulary fans)—to the point we forget they are shortcuts. As we sit through meetings and the presenter powers through those slides, most of us will fall into the mental trap of taking the graphics and data at face value. Oh, yes, the trend is going up. It is so clear.

But the map really is not the territory. Data was left out. We can’t review it all. Decisions about what to include and what not to include had to be made. And to the degree that any of those graphs suggests some representation of a future state as being part of the map, or reality, that is where the map fully detached from the territory.

Some of you may have learned this lesson the hard way—possibly bought into some graphical representations that, in hindsight, after some initiative based on the presentation went awry, you realize should have been more closely examined and questioned. Often, where the initiative went awry can be traced back to the information that was never actually included in the slides. At the time, it didn’t seem at all important enough to include.

CEOs and senior leaders can often be relied upon to ask the probing questions about underlying assumptions and other elements that are not represented in graphics and data. Understanding that the map is not the territory seems to be a model that all senior leaders are taught early on, possibly on the same day that they learn the senior leader secret handshake.

I am sure many of my readers already understood the lessons of the model (in part because this is such an intelligent, hard-charging readership), but there are many for whom the model will be helpful. I am happy to fess up to possessing a mind that regularly is seduced by graphics and data points and not always being alert to the full extent to which so much of the territory has been left out.

But no longer. I get it. Thank you, Charlie. The model has been planted in my mind. Just like that. The map is not the territory. That relatively simple concept is remarkably effective at opening a wide-ranging, broadly applicable line of thinking and understanding. I didn’t need a semester in geography to indirectly intuit the insight after months and months. Someone just needed to explain the model. Give it a name. Provide an example. Roger that.

And like that, my mind and the minds of others reading this, now have a trigger in place that will likely go off in circumstances when there is the potential to gloss over what is being omitted. Just try to look the next graph you see in a presentation and not start wondering about what is not represented.

Many many models

The map is not the territory is obviously just one example of a mental model, one of many that can be learned.

Charlie Munger, as mentioned, has his hundred or so working models, while Shane Parrish and his team have turned out a beautiful three-volume book set, The Great Mental Models, that introduces mental models from a wide range of disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, systems, math, etc.).

Some names of the other models covered in the series include: circle of competence, first principles thinking, inversion, Occam’s Razor, Hanlon’s Razor, probabilistic thinking, emergence, irreducibility, algorithms, regression to the mean, relativity, velocity, and so on.

Of those, first principles thinking is one of the best examples for the power of mental models. First principles is about removing a lot of the clutter that may have grown up around a situation that you are analyzing. In a way, it is the opposite of reverse engineering, while also being related to reverse engineering. Which I realize is confusing.

The best example of first principles thinking is Elon Musk and outside-the-box thinking that he has repeatedly demonstrated to innovate in a wide range of business sectors. Want to explore Mars but are being told that an astronomical expense stands in the way? Musk’s response was to mentally remove all the stuff that has become seemingly synonymous with rockets and space exploration.

With first principles, he could start with a back-of-the-napkin calculation, simply adding up the costs of the raw materials—metal, fuel, computers, etc.—without buying into the full surrounding space travel infrastructure. The radical disparity between those basic costs and the massive funds expended on the government’s space programs quickly signaled to Musk that there was an opportunity. He had pierced through the bubble of conventional wisdom.

The first principles model, like the the map is not the territory, is in part powerful because it helps our brain get past its tendency to take shortcuts and conserve energy. In the first principles case the shortcut is taking the current approach as inevitable. Sort of like the idea that the way to teach kids to think is to not actually talk about thinking. (Are you listening K-12?)

Am I just a big nerd, or is that kind of thrilling and inspiring and hope-generating? We or our kids don’t need to be born with Musk’s level of natural intellectual gifts and all his years of study to appropriate a significant element of what makes his thinking unique. We read about a model that explains some of this thinking and some synapses in our minds’ fire, and connections are made. We have the ‘I get it’ feeling and our thinking is enhanced as a result.

Teaching models to our kids

Throughout the learning we do in life, we are continually acquiring and building thinking skills. Some of these take years to acquire—as in the case of law students building the mental framework for analyzing and problem solving through a legal lens (constitution, law, contract, precedence, etc.). Some, like mental models, can be acquired far more rapidly.

And one other appealing aspect of teaching kids about mental models is that they don’t even have grasp a single model to benefit from the lesson. Simply explaining the general concept that there is such a thing as thinking tools that we want to acquire in life, that alone is a powerful concept. Shane Parrish used the image of a toolbox on the The Great Mental Models, and I went with an image of tools filling my head for this post. Just getting that far is progress.

For kids who have the interest to go further, I would recommend the approach my son and I are taking, which is starting out by reading some of The Great Mental Models, hopping around a bit to the models that seem most interesting, before plunging into the world of YouTube and watching a some videos (including some good ones from a series by someone known as The Swedish Investor). We are both benefitting from the exercise.

Another option for teaching kids, though, would be to start by introducing kids to a mental model that is categorically designed to speak to them right where they live, at least those kids who are allowed time for online gaming. Let’s call life-as-video-game thinking. (This incidentally occurred to me upon waking at 5 a.m. the other day, which is yet another but unrelated aspect of the human mind and thinking—how we problem solve and create in our sleep.)

Video games are all scoring, strategy, game objectives, tactics, tools, weapons of varying effectiveness, rules, trade-offs, alliances, Hail Mary maneuvers, insights from friends, imitating top performers, and even cheat codes. And this confluence of dynamics are in their own way an effective mental model for other circumstances kids will face in life: getting good grades, building friend networks, dabbling ing romance, pursuing career success, and so on.

So, with the life-as-video-game thinking mental model, we encourage kids to think of their video game mastery as they approach these new situations and realize that there will be corollaries, ways in which succeeding in the new environment will be akin to succeeding in video games. So, they should be looking understand the rules, and to learn the best strategies from others who excel, and test out different tactics—all the aspects of video game success.

The appeal of seeing these new arenas from the vantage of the life-as-video-game model is that kids don’t need to start from scratch all the way down at the bottom of the learning curve. Kids who play video games have already done extensive work wiring this adeptness at game success in their minds. To the extent they see new pursuits through the video game lens, they gain a big head start in using the existing wiring to more rapidly move toward success.

(Ironically—and I am really getting out over my skis in this bit of intellectualizing—video game companies sometimes build new games by working with the original code and game engine from an existing title, which is a pretty solid metaphor for how mental models themselves can function in our minds—a way of at times building on existing progress.)

For kids who get it, the moment someone tells them that sending flowers to someone after a particularly lovely date is a gesture that has all of the unstoppable force of using scar or pump in Fortnite (no idea what those are and am totally relying on my son for the examples) is the moment that they feel far more comfortable and less self conscious about the gesture.

And should a kid who understands the model be struggling in the some new life challenge, we can remind them: the way to succeed in this new realm is to go back to that online gaming level mastery you have built, and work on finding the translation, figuring how they relate, which, in the end, comes down to getting the best information on success strategies combined with a lot of practice (play the game, get killed, think about where you went wrong, learn from others, play again and again).

Wrapping it all up

There is a slippery slope aspect to learning about mental models, which is very much in the vein of ‘to the person with. a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’

It isn’t long before any intelligent concept seems like it might be a mental model. This occurred to me as I was explaining the concept of ‘opportunity cost’ to my son, which I was doing because the topic somehow came up, and because we were in a car, traveling at a high rate of speed, so I could wax on without him escaping.

Opportunity cost is such a big, potent concept that has such sweeping implications in our lives—given that time is a limited resource for us as individuals, every choice we make for how we spend out time in a way has opportunity costs of some sort. But just because it is an economic concept that can be applied more broadly, that doesn’t necessarily make it a mental model, right? Or is it?

It seems to me that there is a separate category that is mental model adjacent: intellectual concepts that are dense, clever, and have relatively far-reaching implications in life, but aren’t models per se. As such these concepts, like mental models, have a disproportionate ability to enhance our ability to think simply by being added to our minds. Mental models, meet big-bang-for-your-buck intellectual concepts (we will work on a catchier name).

I think our kids will benefit from learning these other topics directly too (as my son did from learning opportunity cost outside of an economics class, which won’t be offered to him until he goes to college years from now, assuming he chooses that rout), but I would suggest starting with mental models. Keep the toolbox that you start filling less cluttered.

We can take steps to help our kids think better, just as we can make progress improving our own thinking. Investment professionals know what is at stake and that it is possible to improve and gain an edge. It makes zero sense that K-12 doesn’t get this and focus directly on this work, as we who are first principles thinking model fans are painfully aware.

Someday things will change. But it may not be until our kids have kids, given the pace of innovation in most schools. For now, these learning insights and their resulting mental enhancements have to be handed down, like banned books back in the old Soviet Union. So, it is Munger to Parrish to Ueland to you, and from there possibly on to young minds you might be tasked with helping to develop.

I know of at least one 14-year-old who has benefitted. There are mental model tools adding up in that particular youngsters’s mind and they are combining to improve his thinking in a way that wouldn’t if we were relying on school alone. I will take a moment to celebrate this progress because there are so many days that feel like the setbacks at school are winning out (see earlier reference to the disaster that is my daughter’s math class).

So, thanks to mental models for what appears to be a clear parental educational win. My only related concern is the unsettled sense that my son is coming on strong and that I am going to have to up my mental game before entering into the next negotiation with him. If I don’t watch out, he is going to somehow trick me into a making beer run him and his friends, and somehow I will only later realize what I have done.

In addition to working on my own thinking, I am going to take steps to remind him that I still have a trick or two up my sleeve. I came up with one such trick this very morning. Now that the snow has finally melted, it revealed the very stationary remains of a squirrel in our backyard, one who was presumably done in by the historic winter snowfall. As it happens, squirrels give me the willies, and I really don’t want to deal with it.

Time to inform the kid about another work task that is included in his new $10 weekly salary. It falls under ‘other duties as assigned’. Too bad. There was a time that I would have gladly handed him a $25 to make that thing disappear.