Cycles

There are many definitions of different cycles. The main definition for your purpose is: ”a course or series of events or operations that recur regularly and usually lead back to the starting point. Everything and everyone have their own natural cycles. You can also talk about natural rhytms. The longer the cycle, the less people are aware of its existence. The lengths of the cycles have lots of variation. One of the shortest cycles is breathing. Exhaling and Inhaling is a whole cycle. The longest ones can take decades like longer term debt cycles. There is a lot to say about cycles. And right now, we will cover only basics in terms of personal life, expertise, and other things, through the viewpoint of individuals. In this text, we are concentrating mostly on the daily cycle.

A typical cycle has it´s ups and downs

You can see a one normal sine wave cycle in the picture below. The purpose is not to teach mathematics or physics. The idea is to look at the wave cycle and think about what it really means in terms of individuals. Here is the link for the picture.

Picture 1. Sine Wave Cycle

What you really see is that every cycle has its starting point and the end point. In reality, all the cycles are not the same. Only principles stay the same. The length and the depth of the upper part and the lower part of the cycles vary. For example, focus on the day´s tasks has variation during the day. The wave in the picture is not a perfect description for it. What really happens is that after a good sleep, you probably still function below the mid point of our ability to focus. Without sleeping you would definitely be in the bottom of the focus cycle. There is no way of maintaining the highest focus throughout the day. If you try to do it too long, the fall from the top to the bottom will be faster and the recovery will be longer. The bottom of the cycle will also be deeper. The most important thing about performance cycles is that you need to maximize the usefulness and the lenght of the upper part of the cycle and minimize the damage done in the bottom of the cycle and it´s length. There are certain limits you cannot overcome and we need to be aware of them.

The upper part of the cycle is for the most important things, sleep is the exception

The length of the upper part of the cycle matters, but you cannot keep ourselves in the upper part of the cycle forever, no matter what you are talking about. Going too far in lengthening the upper part of the cycle will create the worst damage. And the bottom part of the cycle will be much longer. Practicing will make the upper part longer and the lower part shorter. Temporarily, you can stay longer in the upper part of the cycle. For example, you can work overtime for days or sometimes even longer. Eventually, the quality of the work will be so poor that you have already moved to the lower part of the cycle. You may have not noticed it and there is the danger of going too far. The result of this is lots of damage.

You need to maximize the good things during the upper part of the cycle. You should reserve the times for the most important things for it. The most important tasks at work should be done during the highest part of the cycle. The biggest decisions should be made only during this time. Buying a house or other big expenses should be considered then. Practicing a new skill should also be done only during the best hours of the day. The right nerve fiber chains need to be strengthened. The probability of this happening is the greatest during the best hours. If it is not possible during these hours, you should improve our skills during the next best hours like early in the evening after having a break from work.

The lower part of the cycle is for the less important things and recovery

You need to minimize the bad things during the lower part of the cycle. The lower part of the cycle is also for the less important things. You shouldn´t start anything important after utilizing the full force of the upper part of the cycle. Eventually, you will move to lower part of the performance cycle. You have some less important things to do during the day, or you are lying to yourself. When the ability to perform have diminished, you can start doing things that do not really matter, like watching TV, surfing the web, or checking our mails. You should do these things when we are not efficient. For most of us, this means during the last working hours or the evenings.

The lower part of the performance cycle should also be used for recovering from the performance of the upper part of the cycle. It is not the question of ”should you do it?” You must do it. The upper part of the cycle has a limited length. It depends on your mental and physical abilities, but even the people with the greatest abilities have their limits. Ninety minutes of full concentration is the natural limit. Then we need to have a break. It should be used for recovery This ninety minute cycle is called the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (BRAC). People with greatest abilities need shorter breaks. Ability to recover faster is one of the clearest signs of an expert in any physical field. This works well with mental expertise too, but it is harder to notice.

The best way to recover is sleeping. You cannot always do that, but you should at least aim for it. Top performers sleep a lot. Especially, in any physical expertise like in sports. They need to sleep more to recover after their work outs. Most of the top performers in physical fields take naps and sleep longer hours than normal people. It is a necessity for them. Sleeping enough is good for you. Whether you are an expert in physical or mental field. It is one of the less well used tool for achieving better performance. Some other ways of recovering is getting your glucose level optimal by eating a correct amount of good nutrition and getting some fresh air during the day while doing some kind of exercise. Latter may not be possible, but the former is for everyone.

Planning your days by optimizing your daily cycles

This plan is for the people with normal daily cycles. Sleeping well and enough should be our top priorities. It is the best way to recover after yesterday´s loads. It is actually the only way. It boostsy our performance during the next day. You cannot be a top performer right after you have woken up. Your most productive hours are probably 2-4 hours after that. Before getting into the most productive hours, you should prepare yourself for top performance and you can also do some less important things, whatever they may be. You should use your most productive hours for the most important things. And you should have at least a small break or a lunch after ninety minutes of working with high intensity and focus. Then you can repeat the high intensity work for another 90 minutes.

Some people can still manage the high intensity work for a while after another break. For most people, the daily limit of productive high intensity work is only three hours. Most people do not really believe this and they think they can work longer with the same intensity and focus, but it is a lie people tell themselves. They can still work by doing the less important things, but the intensity won´t be the same. It is not so important what you do after working as long as it is not destroying the recovery period. The optimal way is to accelerate the recovery by exercising, relaxing and sleeping enough. Doing things that feel great is the best way after sleeping to recover from the working day´s efforts.

Sources:

Power of Full Engagement, Tony Schwartz
Be Excellent at Anything, Tony Schwartz

Principles, Ray Dalio

The Fourth Turning, William Strauss, Neil Howe

Take care,

-TT

Skills

Human skills are created by chains of nerve fibers carrying electrical impulses. A simple skill involves a chain of hundreds of thousands of nerve fibers and synapses. The faster and stronger the signals, the more automatic is the skill. There is a matter called myelin, which insulates the chains of nerve fibers. Myelin keeps electrical signals from leaking out from the chains. There is always an optimal way of doing things. When you repeat an action in an optimal way, you add some myelin around the right chain of nerve fibers. The more you do it in the right way, the thicker the layers of myelin come and the faster and more accurate your movements or thoughts become. There is a downside of myelin. If you practice in a wrong way, you add myelin into the wrong chain and you get better at doing the things in a wrong way. This doesn´t mean you cannot make mistakes while you are learning. But it means you should avoid repeating them.

All movements are made of chains of nerve fibers and all the chains grow according to certain rules. The chains decide the timing and the strength of each muscle contraption. A fast, synchronous chain produces a fast, synchronous movement. The more you develop a chain, the more automatic it will become and the less you are aware of the chain. It takes a long time to learn a complex skill. You have to remember the opportunity cost in learning a complex skill. While your brains can probably handle any changes in the nerve fiber chains, you don´t have enough time to improve all of them. When you practice one skill, you cannot practice another.

Myths about developing skills

There are two common myths about developing skills. First, you imagine some people have an innate talent and without it, it is impossible to develop a skill to the level of expertise. Second, when you practice enough in the right way, we you be a top performer in any skill. Both of these myths are partly right. The first one is more wrong than the second.

Lets start with the first one. Truth is, a person with a mediocre talent, with a good process will eventually beat the more talented person with a mediocre process. What happens here, is that more talented person will first beat the crap out of the less talented. Less talented person will practice a skill with a better process and his nerve fiber chains will eventually get stronger and faster. The reason for this is that less talented person will eventually have enough more high quality repetitions, which equalizes the difference. The more talented has an advantage of needing less repetitions, but he will eventually fail to use it for his/her advantage. There are some practical skills, in which expertise can be achieved only by some people. There are some natural properties of the body that cannot be improved. If you want to be a good baseball hitter, you need to have a certain level of vision.

The second myth could be called the myth of 10,000 hours, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. His rule basically says, everybody needs at least 10,000 hours to achieve a top performance in any competitive field. He has found that rule from Anders Ericsson who has done research on expertise. Gladwell´s problem is the interpretation of the research. When Ericsson said you need on average 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve expert performance. Gladwell talks about minimum. He basically says, that everybody needs about the same amount of time and the same way of practicing to achieve expertise. This is not true. What Ericsson´s research really means, is the amount of practice varies depending on people´s talent, when other factors are the same. Less talented people may need 20,000 hours of same practice to gain the same skills as the world class talent may survive with only 5,000 hours. I am not denying that you need to put thousands of hours into practice, or saying that the right kind of practice isn´t needed.

Better mental models, better skills

When I introduced a latticework of mental models, I mentioned a need to have two latticeworks and combine them. First is a general latticework of mental models and the second one is specialized to some area of expertise. It is hard to have any expertise in practical skills without having more detailed and accurate mental models in moving your body. Experts in physical fields, have proper mental models to establish a clear picture what the action should look like at every part of the movement. You need to be able to think how it feels to perform the action part by part. Mental models are held in long term memory and can be used to get fast and effective responses in certain patterns of information like a movement in opponents body while playing tennis. You always have to hold on to and process lots of information simultaneously. Any complicated action requires building mental models of one sort or another.

Experts develop highly complex and detail-oriented mental models of the different situations they are likely going to encounter. They have an ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing for the less skilled performers. In some physical actions, experts may use movement that novices do not even see happening. Experts have mental models that let them consider more things at once. They have a better understanding, which enables them to separate the more important data from the less important. They can see the relevant data as larger pieces of larger patterns, not as some isolated bits of information. They can select the best solution from the larger amount of possibilities than less skilled people.

Choose your expertise wisely

You dont´have enough time to learn everything. There is always an opportunity cost between having a skill and time used for acquiring it. It costs less to achieve an expert level in any competitive skill if you are talented. 10,000 hours is almost 3 hours/day for 10 years. If you have no talent, you will probably need at least 20,000 hours and it is too much. And because you need to be concentrated while you are practicing, there is not much possibilities of speeding up the process. Physical and mental skills are different in this, because mental skills do not deteriorate as fast as physical. All people need to practice to achieve expertise and the best way to do it by following the principles of deliberate practice.

Sources:

Peak, Anders Ericsson
The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
Mastery, George Leonard
Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin
Bounce, Matthew Syed

Data utilization: Information -> Understanding -> Action

My definition for the data utilization is the act of making practical and effective use of things known, or information or both of them, that are assumed as facts. This definition is not perfect, but is close enough for what I am thinking. Anyone who has better words for the name of the mental model or it´s definition, is welcome to give better ones. The purpose is to describe the whole chain from acquiring information to last piece of the chain, which is the action. The problem with the data utilization is that most of the people cannot use the whole chain effectively or cannot get enough useful information.

Information

This word may not be the best one to use, but what I mean about information is all the messages, gossip, impulses and facts we receive from our environment or from some other medium. You live in the information age. You have better possibilities to acquire useful information than any time before. The problem is you get more information our brains can handle and the quality of the most of it is really poor. At least, ninety per cent of the information you receive has a poor quality. And at least ninety per cent of the high quality information is never used, because of distractions or a lack of understanding about which information has the highest quality. I am probably very optimistic about these figures, because I read at least one non-fiction book every week and take notes from them. And until now, I have never taken notes that are even close to the amount of five per cent of any book. I have no doubts, that this blog will be the same for the readers. It is not a sad fact, it is a law of information.

Most of the information received is never consciously noticed, even though, your brains is actually processing it. What happens is that your brains make a decisions all the time whether something is useful to you or not. All the decisions consume energy. All the unnecessary decisions should be avoided by arranging our environment in a way in which the amount of unnecessary decisions are minimized. And you can focus on only things that are important to you. This gets more important all the time.

Understanding (Knowledge)

One can use the word knowledge, instead of understanding. The former word is more complicated to me and I prefer the latter. Understanding can be theoretical or practical. You can get understanding from content and experiences. For example, you can find understanding about how gravity is influencing your smartphone by reading physics books or by dropping the smartphone from your hand. You will never be excellent unless you have some theoretical understanding about what you are doing. You will never be excellent in anything without knowing the factual principles about it. You will probably never be excellent in anything untilyoue have collected enough practical understanding through your experiences. The combination of the theoretical and practical understanding will give the best results.

The problem with the amount of understanding is not the excess of it like with the information. In contrast, there is not enough understanding in the world. Understanding is getting harder, because the amount of information we are exposed to has sky-rocketed. At the same time, the processing of the information has diminished. It is easier to find a solution for a problem by searching it with Google than actually thinking about it. To get better results in life, there is a need to actually understand the solution you are given, because most of the solutions you find are not based on facts. Instead, they are based on beliefs and misunderstandings. The single biggest mistake in understanding great results is believing you can explain them with a single factor. This is a reason why it is important to understand a latticework of mental models.

Action

Action can be defined as ”process of doing something”. This definition is good enough for me. This is the last piece of the chain, but not the least important. This is the part where I have the biggest problems. You can have the best quality information and a complete understanding about it, but still fail. It is very probable that you fail when you are not able to repeat the high quality actions consistently. You cannot have high quality actions by only learning theory. High quality actions need repetitions whether the action is a decision or a movement of the body part.

When you talk about movements and decisions, you are talking about a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons, which is a circuit of nerve fibers. Neurons are connected with each other by synapses. A simple action like kicking football goes through a circuit of hundreds of thousands of synapses and nerve fibers. The same circuit gets stronger when we repeat an action.The more repetition we have, the less aware we are about using the circuit. The more wrong repetitions we have, the harder it comes to unlearn or change the action. We will go further into details in the next mental model, skills.

You should divide actions into conscious and unconscious actions. I have seen many different evaluations about their proportions in each person´s life. Depending on the source, unconscious actions are working from 40 per cent to 95 per cent of the time. Reality depends on a person and truth lies somewhere in between those numbers. Conscious actions are important in improving unconscious actions. It is harder to improve unless you are thinking what you are doing. Well learnt practical actions are automated and do not require consciousness. This is actually a requirement for expertise in them. It saves energy, which is necessary.

Habits are probably the most important unconscious actions. Developing the high quality habits are the best way to get better success in your life. Bad habits may destroy all the good ones and do the damage you cannot outdone without changing them. Consciousness is a hindrance in practical actions. It can be very useful in decision-making. At least when there are many things to consider and enough time to make a decision.

All the parts need to have a high quality

The quality of the chain is equal to its weakest link. Unless you cannot focus on a high quality understanding of the high quality information, you have no chance to act wisely. To do the right things, in the right order, in the right time is hard. Lets think about a simple looking action like passing a ball in soccer. This is a very simplified version of the chain. This is about one way of passing the ball.

First, player needs high quality information. The pass has at least ten parts. And player needs someone who is able to show all the different parts and the whole action to a player. All the information about the different parts and the whole action should have high quality. Then, the player needs to understand how all these parts function together and what are the consequences when some parts are not performed as they should be. Player should also understand, for example, what is the optimal power to perform the passing action in different situations in the game or where to direct the pass. Then comes the passing action, which should be repeated all the time in the right way to improve the skill.

-TT

Introduction to a latticework of mental models and the blog

”Knowledge is not the personal property of its discoverer, but the common property of all”

-Benjamin Franklin

I have been a fool for most of my life. I stumbled upon the mental models by accident. I was studying the best investors of all time. And I found Charlie Munger and his idea about the latticework of mental models by trying to find how to make better investments. I consider the best way to learn, is to study the all-time greats in their own fields and their ideas. Munger is one of them. It took me a while to understand the concept of the latticework, but I have found it useful in my life. 

Most of the scientific breakthroughs have been only mental models before their discoveries have been proven

A mental model is an idea of how something works in the real world. Most of the scientific breakthroughs have been only mental descriptions before they have been proven. These descriptions of the basic laws of the universe are, in essence, the laws of thinking. They are the basics of the past, present, and future. Mental models are the simplified versions of the laws of the universe. The laws of the universe are too complex to be explained with enough precision by using the exact laws.

You need to know all the big ideas from multiple disciplines like mathematics, chemistry, physics, engineering, psychology, and economics, and use them routinely. You need to have models from different disciplines because all the wisdom cannot be found from one academic department. You need to identify core principles from every department and understand them. And understand how they relate to each other. You cannot just remember isolated facts and think you know everything. You don´t have enough brainpower. You need to create a latticework of mental models to understand how things are connected. The best models are the most basic scientific principles like inertia in physics or combinations in mathematics.

The amount of useful mental models is around a hundred. You will probably need a lot a smaller amount of models most of the time. The amount of the most important models is between twenty and thirty. You don´t have to understand all the models deeply, but you need to understand how they work at the basic level. You also need to think out of the disciplinary boundaries. You can only be a good thinker by forgetting them and by applying different mental models in many disciplines. For example, the mental model of cycles can be used in mathematics, physics, economics, and even in enhancing productivity or learning new skills. This flexibility makes most of the big ideas so powerful.

Using a latticework of mental models is a skill

Using mental models and connecting them with each other is a skill. And like learning other skills you need time and lots of repetition to truly master it. You have to learn the right things, in the right way, in the right order, and at the right time. I have spent two years and I have just started. There are no short-cuts. You need a critical mass of understanding to use mental models with their fullest potential. Constructing a latticework of mental models is a complex skill. The latticework is constructed from smaller sets of subskills. Understanding a single mental model is one subskill.

Some models intertwine with each other. You need to understand these connections thoroughly. Some people are more talented in learning to apply mental models in their daily lives. Others may need a lot more effort and time than others. And in like other skills, if you did learn to do things in the wrong way, you have to unlearn everything. The younger you start the easier learning is because your brain hasn´t strengthened the wrong connections.

This skill-based, learn the right things, in the right order approach, is what separates me from the others who blog about mental models. My problem is that nobody has done this before. I will probably make some mistakes about in which order these models should be taught. People are also different, which means the order introducing mental models my way, will not apply to everybody.

You have your mental models and some kind of latticework(s) working all the time

Everybody has their own mental models. We have tens of models. For example, what you think will happen to your iPhone if you drop it, is a mental model. How you think you will react is another one. The combination of the models can be a small part of latticework or they can just be separate models without connection in your head. You have your own models and I have only one question for you: Why wouldn´t you want to have better ones? I will show you what those models are and how you can use them to your advantage. You have to understand that no amount of information will guarantee an understanding and no amount of understanding will guarantee wisdom to use it properly. Reading and understanding are not enough without the proper utilization of the models.

The optimal latticework consists of the most basic scientific principles and the detailed models in your perspective field.

The optimal latticework consists of the most basic scientific principles of the most important disciplines and their interaction, and those principles should be connected to the expertise of your own detailed knowledge in the area of your own discipline. These two latticeworks combined as a bigger latticework will make you a truly world-class performer in an intellectual field instead of a fool with a fancy title. What sets expert performers from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental models.

My purpose is to give you some tools for creating a better latticework of the general principles and help you utilize it better. Your responsibility is to connect it with your discipline. You have to understand that no amount of information will guarantee an understanding and no amount of understanding will guarantee the wisdom to use it properly. This chain is what I call the utilization of data, and it will be the first model I will introduce. I will deliver you the information and the knowledge I have and you have to do the rest.

The three main benefits of learning the latticework of mental models with purest scientific principles:

• You will get a better general education.
• You will learn how to be more efficient and more productive.
• You will need to gather less information to get better results. Mental models make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly and you will need less experiential understanding.

You need to understand many factors and use many models at the same time.

We are at the beginning of the era, in which we can apply the results of modeling through multiple models and factors more accurately than before. This is necessary because big things great people do are never the results of a single factor. They happen, because of the interaction of many factors from genes to upbringing, from education to the concentration of hormones between individual brain cells. Thinking through multiple models and many factors at the same time is necessary, but rare. I read at least one non-fiction book a week to make my understanding of the latticework better. Most of the authors of the books think the factor they are promoting is the only factor for something happening. This leads to an incomplete understanding of the big picture and worse results in what people are trying to accomplish. With a lack of synthesis, you will end up like a man who sees every problem as a nail, because the only tool he has is a hammer.

We need to analyze the big data to get more accurate results of the research in psychology. Most of the studies are, for example, still made by researching one or two psychological biases at the same time. In reality, most of the time, the number of factors is not enough and the results we get are not truthful enough. We need more resources and the big data will help. It will take some time, but in the end, we will get there.

I will start with the most important models and how individuals can use them

In this blog, I will start with the most basic and most important models. They are also the highest quality models. I will introduce one model per week. The rest of the time is reserved for discussion. I will try to keep the models as simple as possible. First, I will introduce the most important models separately and some of their interactions with each other. The amount of the most basic and the most important models is somewhere between twenty and thirty. These models will give you most of the information you need about the latticework. Then I may get further into details with them before going into the less important models. This order may change, depending on how things move on.

Everything will be seen from the viewpoint of an individual, but most of the models can be applied to a larger group of people or even to the big organizations. Later on, it may change. I have already written a book about personal finance in Finnish, in which I use the latticework of mental models in developing better ways of using money or understanding the economy. I may write a better book about those things in English later, but I have not made any decisions about it.

I will try to keep the number of models as small as possible. Sometimes this is not as simple as I would like it to be. Because of the interaction of the models. For example, consistency bias and status quo bias in psychology can be seen as inertia in physics. The names I use may vary with names the other mental model's bloggers or experts use. I will try to use the terms of the most basic disciplines like mathematics, physics, or chemistry. For example, I will use Inertia instead of status quo bias as I try to keep things as simple as possible. There is no need to use both. If you really understand the models, there is no need to complicate things by increasing the amount of them.

At least 90% of the things I publish will be free

All these blog posts will be free. Unfortunately, everything has an opportunity cost. You have to be willing to believe you get enough added value from reading my blog to justify the cost of using the most valuable commodity of yours, time. You will never get it back. Feel free to share all the information in this blog with all the people you think will get added value from it. I will probably publish some books about mental models and those will probably not be free. Books have a better user interface than a blogger, which I am using.

Do you consider yourself as a helpful person?

Could you give me some advice by answering two questions:

On a scale from 1 to 10, how useful is this information to you?

Why didn´t you give a lower number?

I hope you find this information useful and want to improve your mental models with me!

-TT

List of mental models

List of mental models

The idea about this list of mental models is to tell two things. First, it is to get people to discuss, which ones are the most important. Second, is to show in which order those models will be presented and hopefully get some discussion going about which actually is the right order. What is your choice of order?

The most important ones

Latticework of Mental Models
Data Utilization
Skill
Cycles
Inertia
Simplicity
Reactions
Critical Mass
The path of least resistance
Deliberate practice
Motivation
Combinations and Permutations, Lollapalooza-Effect
Compound Effect
Systems
Feedback Loops
Decision making systems 
Edge/Comparative Advantage
Willpower
Inversion 
Checklists
Evolution
Probabilities and Statistics.html
Power laws
Risks 
Antifragility
Opportunity costs
Psychological tendencies (heuristics and biases)l
Excessive self-regard (egocentricity)
Availability bias
Tendency to make associations
Social proof
Strategy


The less important ones

Disruption
Flow-state
Leverage
Communication systems
Scarcity/Abundance Authority misinfluence
Reciprocity
Contrast misreaction tendency

Contacts and comments

There are two ways to communicate with me about mental models. First, is giving comments into the blog posts. Second, is through email. The address is tommisalmanack@mail.com.  Be patient if you are not getting the answer soon.

Finnish is my mother tongue, so do not be surprised if I have to ask what you mean. This shouldn´t normally happen, but sometimes it may be the case. I hope everybody´s comments about the blog are in English. You can try to ask questions through email with English, Finnish, Swedish, German, and Spanish. Swedish, German, and Spanish are the weakest languages, but I will probably understand what you are writing. I may have to answer in English in those cases.