Mental Models, Taking the Driver’s Seat with Actionable Steps

Part 5

8 min readJan 31, 2021

Welcome back to the last article of this series on building effective mental models and using them to think creatively. We have come a long way.

We discussed fundamental mental models and wide mental models.

We learned about how to use learning and practice to build memorable mental models to be called into use when needed.

We also looked at some examples of breaking down situations using my own observations.

I’d like to use the remaining article to suggest how you can begin doing the same. Let us turn the strategy described in the previous articles into some actions steps and trackable efforts.

Weave These Learnings into Your Own Strategy

First, a note on the strategy. I want to be clear that it is yours to take and mold into what works for you. Take the parts that work and feel free to adapt the parts that do not. In the series, I have tried to do my best to recreate onto paper the ideas and experiences I have in my head about what has worked for me. Writing at heart is a transfer from mind to paper and a hope that the distance between is small.

Similarly, I believe that a distanced 3rd person perspective of your mental-models and an endeavor to experiment with improving them is far better than haphazard learning or even worse a passive learning. A passive learner’s models develop randomly, as life happens to them. If a haphazard learner is in the passenger’s seat, the passive learner is in the trunk.

The ideal spot from which to build your models is in the driver’s seat where you can actively choose and shape them based on your own goals and purposes.

When you think of your models from the 3rd person as knowledge you are working on and improving, you are in a more active role in your learning, practice, and innovation. You are driving and not being driven.

From there, how you exactly go about learning and experimenting whether by building wide models or by jumping into projects directly is up to you.

With that in mind, I will share some next steps that may be helpful. They are the things that I do.

Mental Models in the Field

When I think about how to improve mental models, two distinct approaches come to mind. One is developing specific models with intent, and the other is collecting models as we observe and detect them.

Let’s look at the second, and then we will come back to the first.

In contrast with an intention to develop mental models through study and practice in focused mode, we can observe plenty of models out in the field. We tend to not question the ones we recognize, but every now and then we see something odd that forces us to reorient a mental model. It is usually accompanied by a feeling of frustration that you did not think of the possibility before.

Think of the invention of the snow cone.

It’s pretty commonplace now, but originally who would have ever though to eat flavored snow? It seems like an odd idea to have become normalized, and yet it has. What we want to do, is train ourselves to start to see the odd in our head before we see it with our eyes. We want to think of the possibility before. And that comes with noticing mental models and question their fundamentals. Then, we consider what parts of them can change.

I use the term collecting mental models here to describe both noticing and questioning. It’s important to become a collector of mental models by being mindful as you move through your day. It will train you to become better at innovation on a smaller scale, which will precede the larger scale.

Trackable Efforts

Intention to develop specific models comes from a purpose. That purpose could be for excitement, career or business growth, to innovate, a better understanding for how something works, to pass a class, to one-up a know-it-all etc. This article series assumes that you are trying to innovate, but actively building mental models is a sound strategy to do learning for any purpose.

The process is long though. Building the models and refining them takes time. It takes repeated hours of effort. It helps to be clear about why you want to develop your chosen mental models so that you can create the intention and the space to spend the right amount of time on your efforts again and again.

Good mental models are created from hours spent in focused mode study and practice with breaks in between to engage diffused mode and create cross-model connections.

One recommendation I have is to become a collector of hours.

What that means is to track your hours spent learning and practicing. I used to be skeptical of this practice. If I was already putting the time in, what more could actually tracking it offer? What I have discovered since, is that hours are sneaky. They disappear right out from under you, if not watched. A 2-hour reading session turns into a half hour reading session with a bathroom break, a tasty snack, and a laundry-run fairly easily, and we are none the wiser. Within a few days, we’ll forget and usurp our study time again, if we even noticed at all. It’s easy to observe this on a busy work day or a packed weekend. At the end of the day, you might look at the time and wonder where the it went. The day was a blur and it’s hard to remember exactly what it was spent on.

Your tracked time is your defense. It’s getting out in front of the disappearing-time problem.

I recommend that you track your focused time spent learning with a stopwatch and record it somewhere. Do this just for a week recording once per day. At the end of the week, have a look and see if your recollection of time spent is equal to your recorded time.

The first time I did this, it was eye-opening and also a bit frightening. Become a collector of hours, and watch your knowledge grow. Without tracking, your purpose shifts.

Instead of to work toward our chosen purpose for the learning, we work to feel like we are busy. The recollection of busyness can be hard to distinguish from a useful activity, and so memory serves that we are being purposeful when we are really only being busy.

The Substance of Our Hours

Now that we are collecting hours, how do we choose what to spend them on?

In theory, it depends on the purpose and on how you best learn. But in practice, my observation is that the repeatable hours count for more than what they are spent on (within reason). As long as you are engaging the subject with your brain and refining the mental model by organizing what you learn, the repeated hours will create more value than delaying to uncover the optimal activities. To me that is a comforting realization because it means we can just start and see where we go.

I find it useful to create repeatable time blocks. Think of buying a 6-class yoga pack. My packs are 2-hour readings, half-hour mental model diagrams, 10-hour proof of concepts, 1-week experiments, 1-month projects, and 6-month projects. It’s important to have a balance of consuming material, hand-on practice, and model development. Hands-on practice will differ with subject areas.

Model development should come after the learning and practice. It is all about fitting your new knowledge into your previous model or understanding of the subject. It’s an exercise in refinement that helps effectively transfer it to long-term memory in a way that it will be usable for your purpose when recalled.

Keeping a versioned notebook will help you track and refine models over time. My notebook has headers like Accounting: Draft 1 and Computer Networking: Draft 2. I rewrite each of them over time as I learn new things so that I can sum up my knowledge and see how my understanding has changed. The more accurately our models represent reality, the easier it is to see which circumstances and situations work sufficiently, and which can work better.

Deconstruction becomes easier, and so innovation becomes more natural for your mind.

You understand the lower-level models at play and the purposes they serve, and so it becomes easier to swap them for better models. There is also more fuel for your diffused mode to make connections when you’ve spent the time developing broad and deep models.

Exercise

It helps to remember that focused hours of time work like exercise routines. You build your muscles with repeated effort. Your stamina and tolerance for staying in focused mode longer and for spending more hours will grow over time, as you stretch yourself just a little bit more with each day.

Good mental models that represent the world well are hard won. They will set you aside from the crowd. They will let you innovate across fields and create amazing AHA moments.

But they required efforts over a long time. A lot of people quit before they get too far because they look at it like a destination instead of a journey. Your capacity to learn more for longer expands slowly over time like a muscle.

Good mental models are a lifestyle more than an achievement, so become a collector of models and a collector of hours.

Steps to Start

I find that I like a personal development article better when it shares bulleted, actionable next steps.

Become collector of models out in the field
Identify your purpose for learning wider models and use it to help create intention to put the time in
Become a collector of hours spent on learning and practice activities
Version models and watch them grow over time
Remember capacity to build models expands like a muscle capacity and takes time
AHA moments will take care of themselves if you are doing the above

We have made it to the end of the series. I hope you are now equipped with a more concrete strategy for how to deconstruct situations and learn from them, and perhaps have a little more clarity on how to come up with new ideas.

I’d like to leave you with an adapted version of the Serenity Prayer that applies to our model development:

Let me recognize the models I cannot change, understand the models that I can change, and have the courage to create a better way.

I’d like to share some thoughts for future articles. What I’d like to do next is mature the content by exploring more concrete examples and perhaps using more analogy to supplement the more theoretical points in this series.

Here are some of the focuses, which I have in mind:

A deeper explanation of the fundamental models, how other models sit on top of them, and wisdom that can be drawn from them
Continuing examples of deconstructions across a number of different fields
Going back in time to find the models at play in certain well-known historic events

Feel free to comment on what you liked or didn’t like. Especially what parts of the series need more clarity.

Thank You for reading!

To get a sense of how I break situations down into models, please have a look at Part 4 of the series.

Glossary of Terms and Relationships

Model Development is hourly focused-mode routine practice to develop wide and deep mental models in desired areas and diffused time in between to create new ideasModel Collection is observing and question mental models all around us in the field. This is a habit we want to developHour Collection is tracking the time you spend in focused-mode to grow your awareness of time spent in Model Development