About me

Before I start with the introduction, I would like to tell you that I will get back to publishing texts next week. This text is about introducing myself to the readers.

I am Tommi Taavila. I am an independent thinker, a lifelong learner, A son, a brother, an author, and Finnish. I stumbled upon the latticework of mental models by accident. I was searching for answers about what makes the best investors better than others about five years ago and I found Poor Charlie´s Almanack and Charlie Munger´s latticework of mental models system. I realized that it is not only good for investing, but it is probably the best way of understanding the world. When I learned more, I figured out that everybody has their mental models and latticeworks. Most people just haven´t registered that the way they think and act is through their mental models. The quality of the models and latticeworks people have could be much better.

What are my qualifications?

I have no diploma for creating a latticework of mental models. Nobody does. You can have a few diplomas in a few disciplines. But you cannot have diplomas for all the most important disciplines. And you do not need to have them. You just have to understand the big ideas of the most important disciplines and how they intertwine. The former is easy, but the latter is hard. You can learn all the big ideas in all the most important scientific disciplines in a few thousand hours or even less if you know what they are before you start learning. I have monitored my hours for the last two years and I have spent about 2,000 hours learning the models better. This is the best-measured qualification I have for understanding the models. These 2,000 hours consist of reading, writing, and taking notes. These hours measure the direct work about the models in the last two years. Then there are the things I learned before doing this systematic work for finding out and understanding the models in the last two years.

Then, there come the qualifications for understanding how these models intertwine which is much harder. It is more about thinking habits. You have to like thinking. You have to have intellectual curiosity and stretch your mental muscles in multiple directions and want to do it. You need to have a talent in seeing the connections between two completely different phenomena. You have to be able to find real causes behind events. You have to be able to see that some events are just higher-order effects from underlying causes, not events that are caused by the most obvious explanations. Most people do not have all these intellectual traits.

Then there are the traits you can´t have. You cannot suffer from any strong ideologies. For example, you cannot think that capitalism gives you all the answers and socialism is a completely bad ideology. You have to think that both of them have their bad and good characteristics. You can´t have an IQ that is too low. A little bit better than average is enough. You cannot believe that all the answers to the problems of your discipline can be found from the big ideas of your discipline. For example, economics without understanding psychology is pretty much useless. And still, most economists ignore psychology by focusing on the myth of economically rational humans.

A fair warning. I am 80 percent sure I have all the mentioned intellectual traits for doing this. Nobody can be 100 percent sure of most things. If they are, they do not understand the world. My biggest obstacle for doing this is an excessive self-regard. I have a big ego and I have put much effort into doing this. The latter increases the former. I am not always right and I don´t always think I am right. My probability estimate can be wrong too. You have to decide whether it is close to the truth or not. If you repeatedly read my texts, you have probably made some kind of estimation already.

Other information

I am sure you have noticed that my English is far from perfect. I hope you can still understand my texts. I have no business around mental models. I plan to publish three books in the next ten years. The first one will probably be published before the end of 2020. Selling books can make some money, but I doubt it will be enough to compensate for the time I will use for my texts and books. Most of the information in the books is published on this website. You don´t have to buy books to get information. The differences between those books and the information on this website are that books have better edited and more coherent content. I am an independent thinker. I have no research grants, no foreman, no relationships with my sources, and no sponsors to produce this content. I prefer it that way because the only person who can distort my content is me. I also write for a financial online publication Piksu.net and have published three books in Finnish.

Until next week!

-TT