Developer Tea

The Importance of Mental Models

Episode Summary

How is it that we can make so many decisions in a day? Today we're going to talk about what it means to have a mental model.

Episode Notes

How is it that we can make so many decisions in a day? Today we're going to talk about what it means to have a mental model.

Today's Episode is Brought To You By: WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open source eCommerce solution, built on WordPress. With WooCommerce you can sell physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, memberships, services, and tickets - plus offer flexible ways to pay, including Apple Pay and Bitcoin powered by Stripe.

They're giving Developer Tea listeners 20% off purchases when you use promo code DEVELOPERTEA at WooCommerce.com/developertea (offer lasts until end March 2018)

Jon's Cup of Tea -
Don't forget to check out Mad Monk Tea! Remember the code "Developer Tea" will get you 15% off your order.

Episode Transcription

How is it that we make so many decisions every day? On the show in the past, we've talked about heuristics and we've talked about bias. We've also talked about how our brains are kind of lazy. Over time, they learn to kind of compress information and we have to force them, kind of kick them into gear manually sometimes. Sometimes that's a simple thing like taking a new route to work but other times it seems a little bit more difficult. We're going to talk about something that kind of encompasses all of this information in today's episode and I'm really excited about this topic because what we're going to talk about today will truly kind of apply to everyone first of all but it will apply to everything that you will ever do in your career and I'm not overstating this, I'm not exaggerating it. It is actually truly all encompassing. That's the topic that we're talking about today is all encompassing. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers. Hopefully you are a driven developer to help driven developers connect to their career purpose. So they can turn around and do good work. Do better work. They actually produce quality things or actually do quality research, build positive relationships with their co-workers or with the people that use the products that they create or whoever they're servicing. That's really the goal is to better the environment that developers are cultivating and we do that by connecting you to your career purpose. Being beyond that really kind of helping you understand the pathway to better thinking, the pathway to continuous improvement to lifelong learning. We want to uncover as much of that as we can on this show. Today's episode I'm really excited about it because even though it's a very simple topic on the face of it, it really does encompass all of these things that we talked about so many times on this show. Before we jump in I do want to talk about something I wish that everyone would try at least once in their lives. It's a very simple thing. It's loose leaf tea. You are not actually a tea show. I assume that a lot of you do get a cup of tea every once in a while when you listen to the show and there's not a better way to do tea than to do it with loose leaf tea. You can get premium tea right now from Mad Monk Tea for 15% off if you use the code Developer Tea. How many times can we say the word tea in one episode? Truly this is such a good product. They have all of the stuff that you need by the way to brew loose leaf tea right there in their store and it's all affordable. Of course they have a tea of the month club. Go and check that out. Head over to madmonkti.com. Remember the code Developer Tea Checkout for that 15% off. Thank you to madmonkti for partnering with Developer Tea. We're talking today about this thing that kind of all encompassing concepts. It covers bias. It covers the lazy brain. It covers differing perceptions. This concept is the mental model. Mental models. This is such a huge topic. It's so important to understand this. At least from an outside perspective, understand what it means to have a mental model. Mental model is a way of thinking in a limited field. That's the way I'm going to describe it on today's episode. I encourage you to go and do some research on your own once we've gone past this episode because there's no way we're going to cover everything in today's episode. Mental models, they really became super popular in the business world because of Charlie Munger. If you haven't heard of Charlie Munger, then you're probably not alone, even though he is amongst one of the most successful businessmen in our time. Charlie Munger is actually the partner of Warren Buffett. Back in 1994, Charlie Munger spoke to the USC Business School and he basically laid out this idea that you need multiple mental models to be successful. It seems like it's going to be hard, he says, but ultimately, a very small number of these mental models carry most of the weight. He also says that you need mental models from multiple fields. Not just whatever your particular field of study is. How can we identify these multiple models? How can we find ways of expanding our own set of mental models? That's what we're going to talk about. Right after we talk about today's excellent sponsor, Wu Commerce. Wu Commerce powers nearly 30% of all online stores. What that means is that if you've visited over three stores on the internet at any point, if you bought more than three things online from three different places, then you almost certainly have used a Wu Commerce store. You may not even have even known it. That's because Wu Commerce is fully customizable. You're not going to see a Wu Commerce store and know it right away necessarily because you can make it however you want it to be. You can suit this store to fit your exact needs and you can get started very quickly. That's because Wu Commerce is built on top of WordPress. Wu Commerce understands what developers care about. Number one, you're going to keep your data forever. This is not something that Wu Commerce is going to lock up and keep hostage from you. Anytime you need to access it, anytime you decide that you want to move to a different platform, your data is yours to keep. It's yours to take. It's yours to analyze however you want to. Secondly, Wu Commerce is going to make getting set up extremely easy. That's because they have built directly into their onboarding experience and walk through on how to set up your Wu Commerce store. This includes things like getting set up for taxes, which is a huge headache, but they make it easy for you. Additionally, if you're already using other stuff, out in the wild, if you're using other services, for example, there's over 140 extensions and growing in the official WuCommerce.com marketplace. And subscribing for a year gets you support and updates on all of those extensions as well. So if you're looking to start an e-commerce business or if you're working for clients who regularly ask you about doing e-commerce work, maybe you're like me. And you used to say no because e-commerce is so complicated and there's so much that can go wrong. Now you have this new toolkit that you can use, WuCommerce. Go and check it out. WuCommerce.com slides Developer Tea. If you use the code Developer Teaat checkout, you'll get 20% off of WuCommerce until the end of 2018. 20% off. It's a huge discount. Thank you again to WuCommerce for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So we're talking about mental models. We're talking about how you can expand your own mental models. But before we get into that discussion, let's talk for a second about why it's important to recognize that mental models are so powerful and really kind of start thinking through the lens of mental models. If you understand the mental models that you are using actively, then you can kind of separate yourself from those mental models and potentially see your problems in a new way. So this is a problem solving mechanism. Another reason why being aware of mental models is so important. If you recognize what other people's mental models are, if you recognize, for example, a coworker what their mental model is when solving a particular problem, then perhaps you can communicate better with that person. If you recognize what your customers' mental models are, then perhaps you can increase the value and therefore the effectiveness of the products that you're providing to those customers. So the more of these models that you have available to you, the more agile you are in understanding the world. And again, this is not an exaggeration. This is truly understanding the way that other people are perceiving, but it goes beyond that as well. And understanding the things that we have discovered, for example, in the field of science or even in math, there's mental models that are associated with every field of study. And if you look into those, even at a very elementary level, if you look into those mental models, then you can gain insights to a variety of problems that aren't even necessarily limited to the space that the model applies to directly. So for example, if you are a developer, then you've probably encountered divide and conquer algorithms. If you haven't, we'll explain it very simply. Basically, a divide and conquer algorithm means to separate, to create subpartitions of information and to continue creating those subpartitions and solving the problem in smaller pieces rather than trying to solve it in one large piece. It's a very crude explanation of a dividing conquer algorithm. And even though this is kind of a small scale version of a mental model, you can take this concept and apply it to other problems in your life, whether you are organizing people to try to accomplish a particular job, or even something as simple as sorting some papers or cleaning out a closet, you may be able to benefit from some of these mental models that you've gained in programming. Now, imagine if you added to that list of mental models on a regular basis. If you started taking principles, they are learning, remember we talk about principles on the show, principles, models that you're learning in other areas. Maybe you're learning models of psychology, which we talk about all the time on the show. Maybe you're learning models of physics or models of finance. There are all sorts of models and all sorts of depth of these models that you can learn from. The interesting thing is, as Charlie Munger told the students at USC, there really isn't a ton to learn about. There's not so many models that you should feel overwhelmed. You can actually benefit quite a lot from learning the main ones. And when we say the main ones, that's kind of a fluid definition. But an example of this might be for programming, the mental model of functional programming, and then the mental model of object-oriented programming. We call these paradigms as developers, but if you have a mental model that connects to functional programming, then you can take that and apply it in your object-oriented programming languages. You can take some of the principles and still use what is useful in that different model. And something like economics, you need to understand things like the supply and demand mental model. These are things that if you were to look at the titles of the chapters of books and these subjects, these are things that you might find. And understanding that a mental model isn't really a perfectly defined thing, but rather it's kind of a lens, a way of thinking about the world, a way of solving problems, a way of answering questions. And the more ways that you have available to you, the more principles that you've learned from a variety of subjects, the better off you're going to be in your problem-solving contexts. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Our Discussion on Mental Models. We're going to talk about some specific mental models, most likely in the future. And we certainly have talked about mental models in the past, even though we may not have necessarily titled those things or labeled them as mental models. We certainly have talked about some of them in the past. In the future, I love to get a little bit more specific and discuss useful mental models that I'm finding in my own career and share them with you. Thank you so much for listening. We're going to woo commerce for sponsoring today's episode. Remember, woo commerce is such an incredibly easy thing to get up and rolling with. And they're offering you a 20% discount for using the code Developer Tea. That's two words, Developer Tea, that checkout. And remember that code ends in March 2018. The end of March, that code is going to expire. So make sure you head over to woocomers.com slash Developer Tea today. Thank you again for listening. If you're enjoying these episodes and if you don't want to miss out on future episodes, make sure you subscribe. There will be future episodes and they come very quickly. So it's easy to get behind and then ultimately you're probably going to miss something that you would have actually connected with, enjoyed, and potentially benefited from. So go ahead and subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.