Justin Sung — How To Think Like The Top 1%
Source: YouTube Channel: Justin Sung (2130000 subs) Duration: 51:33 Views: 239490 · Likes: 6906 Video: Watch on YouTube
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In this video, I will share 6 mental models that you can use to upgrade your thinking, make better decisions and solve complex problems.
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= About Dr Justin Sung = Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.
Key Insights
Mental models are powerful. Some of the most successful people in the world swear by mental models. Mental models are basically simplified representations of how the world works. You take something really complicated, you simplify it into a framework that you can then use for decision-m and problem solving. For example, a mental model that I really love around decision-m is the expected value model. This model says that instead of thinking about decisions as being either good or bad decisions, you think about each decision as having a set of positive and negative consequences. That we should make decisions that give us a repeated high probability of winning on average over the long term rather than just oneoff. I think this is a great mental model. I use it all the time. I teach the professionals that I work with. It’s such a useful model that it’s become standard in a lot of fields revolving around decision-making and probability like trading and finance and professional poker even. So, in this video, I’m going to share with you six of my favorite [music] mental models. But these aren’t just regular models. These six are very special mental models. In fact, one of my favorite books of all time is probably this one. It’s 50 models for strategic thinking. But here’s the thing that I’ve observed after teaching mental models to so many people. What I’ve realized is that mental models are not enough. [music] Regardless of the actual model that you use, the way that you apply your context and knowledge and situation to the model can make or break how effective it is. For example, I previously worked with this data scientist for this large e-commerce business and they were trying to make a decision about which email campaign to [music] use. And so by looking at the past data, he estimated the probability of making a certain amount of money for each campaign and decided that campaign A is the one that has the higher probability of delivering higher profit than [music] campaign B. So they went with campaign A. They lost a lot of money. The issue wasn’t just luck. The issue was that the past data that he was looking at was in the holiday season and the way that that campaign performs in the holiday season was very different to how it performs in the off season. So even though he was applying this expected value model, he just missed an entire factor, an entire variable that would have changed his equation completely. This is actually the reason why he reached out to me in the first place because it seemed like an impossible problem. How do you know what you don’t know? Yes, you’ve got a model. Yes, you have your knowledge. How do you know you’re applying the model in the right way and you don’t have gaps and blind spots? And so, this aspect is what I want to focus on in today’s video. The six mental models I’m going to give you are not just regular models because they’re what I call meta models. They are the mental models that you should apply whenever you use any other form of mental model. And the first meta model is called nonlinearity. In the example I gave before with that data scientist, the mistake he fundamentally made was that he believed that a certain campaign, so let’s say this campaign is called A leads to a certain level of profit or a certain level of result whereas campaign B led to a different kind of result. And so this is an example of linear logic or linear thinking where we say A leads to result number one and B leads to result number two. But in real life relationships and logic is rarely linear. In real life it’s not like this. It’s more like A and B uh influence each other in the presence of C under the condition of D which also relates to E. And all of these things combined when going through F leads to a certain type of result. And so there is this uh incentive for our brain for the human brain to try to find simplicity to find the the easiest way to understand something. And it’s very tempting to see relation
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