2026
Why Use Mental Models? (Or, How To Live A Life You Always Enjoy)
Because our brains are wired for the natural world of 10,000 years ago.
Since then, we’ve discovered more effective ways to navigate the world.
Yet, we have to consciously choose to navigate the world in these more effective ways; hence, mental models.
For example.
Most people assume that being themselves and being liked by other people are opposing goals.
Consider integer thinking (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3).
Western Europeans thought the idea was “absurd” until about 300 years ago.
Now, we use it everywhere.
But that means that it’s not “natural” to think in these terms (our wetware isn’t wired to perceive the world in these ways).
We see this in ratings: we give something a 1 to 10 rating, or 1 to 5 stars.
Consider that a 1-star rating is terrible, no good, wouldn’t visit again, while a 5-star rating is excellent, couldn’t have been better.
Often when we’re young, our brains note this interesting phenomenon: we can be ourselves, or we can “fit a mold” that doesn’t feel like who we are.
Our default model turns it into a star rating for authenticity vs. being fake.
Fitting the mold is 1 star, and being completely ourselves is 5 stars.
Our default model tells us we have to choose being ourself (5 stars), or being liked by others (1 star).
But consider integer thinking as a mental model.
If we use this mental model, it might look like this:
-5: Something everyone else likes and I hate. +5: Something only I like, but nobody else does.
But wait, what does that make zero?
Well, if the integer line represents “positive experience”, then: 0: Something both everyone else likes and I like.
Experientially, we know this. Ella Fitzgerald is considered, almost universally, a good singer. Being fit is considered, almost universally, a physically attractive trait. In every reality, people like pizza. jk.
In this mental model, something that is popular and that you dislike isn’t 1 star, it’s something like -4 stars.
Also in this model, 4 stars might be something I like, and only 100 other people in the world like it, too. While 1 star is something that I like that 80% of people also like.
So if we use our default model, we think we have to choose between pleasing others vs. living authentically ourselves.
If we use the integer model, another reality becomes possible: you can always live a life you enjoy.
How?
By never being in the negative.
If you want to get along with everybody (0), engage in things that everyone likes and you like.
If you want to find your tribe, engage in things that are +3 and +4 stars to you.
If you want to be a true artist and not care what anyone else thinks, go for +5 stars only.
But. You never need to engage in the negative stars.
Because the lowest you’ll go is the overlap between universally enjoyable and enjoyable to you.
Which means, you would live a life you always enjoy.
Comedians and Entrepreneurs (and Pixar too)
Most people think of comedy as a performing art.
But consider the process:
- Think up something you think would be funny
- Tell the joke to an audience and get feedback
- Incorporate feedback to either scrap the joke or make it better.
Contrast this with what Clark Beckham describes as the process of art: having a clear vision, and then building the skills to express it so that you feel what comes out is true to your vision.
An artist would say whatever is in them, even if others don’t think its funny.
A comedian is more like a software developer building features for an audience.
Get feedback, tweak, deliver, tweak again. And once every part is working, ship it as a new product (a new comedy special).
Pixar does the same thing.
Like for Toy Story 3:
- First draft of script; shoot, edit, and produce actual animation of it
- Screen it (to a small group) and get feedback from the audience
- Repeat this process 7 to 8 times, until the final piece gets the reaction they desire.
Comedy (and the Pixar process) isn’t really a performing art. It’s a lot more like performing entrepreneurship.
Three Career Turning Points (or, the Four Stages of Career)
Most beginners think career looks like this:
- First, find your passion (or your superpowers)
- Second, find a way to do what you love
Yet 10,000 high school basketball players are NBA hopefuls. 3 of them make it.
Those that don’t? Many still had the height, the athleticism, and the practice routine to get there.
To the recruiters, it just didn’t manifest as good enough skills.
Finding what your good at is still important. It’s just not the start of the career. It’s the zeroeth step, the thing that happens before a career. In other words, talent is assumed. The real process looks something like this:
First, consistent skills. Second, consistent business (including choosing the right projects). Third, consistent people. Fourth, consistent life.
For the NBA hopeful, first you have to be good enough to make it in, then you have to learn the business of the NBA and adjust to that life, then you need to find the team that’s the best fit for you and your goals (both personal trainer, but also which team in the NBA), and then you have to maintain consistency while making sure your life outside of your work doesn’t break down.
That is the full arc of the career, in four stages. Which means three career turning points.
There comes a point in your career where you have complete confidence in your skills. You’re just not sure the market wants to pay for them consistently (a business).
There comes a point in your career where you have complete confidence in your business. You’re just not sure you can get the right people, clients and employees, to collaborate consistently (a team).
There comes a point in your career where you have complete confidence in your team. You’re just not sure if it will all come crashing down, or if you get too old to do it, or if you waited too long for everything else (a life).
The hard turnings are from skills -> business, from business -> people, and from people -> life.
For example:
- In working with beginners (n > 10,000), they don’t get out of stage even understanding what they’re good at. If you’re naturally 1 in 1000 (top 0.1%) without trying, then you’ve found something you’re good at.
- In working with talented people (n > 100), they can’t build consistent skills. You know you are consistently skilled when you feel like your skills match your talent: you’re not limited in executing what your mind and body are capable of.
- In working with consistently skilled people (n > 30), they can’t build consistent businesses. A business (including a day job) is where you are not limited by how much money you want to make executing your skill. You make as much money as you want with your skill.
- In working with consistent business people (n is approx. 10), they can’t build consistent teams of people. A consistent team of people are those that increase your success, and aren’t a hindrance to it. This includes in your personal life (think Will Smith and Jada).
- A consistent life means you’re not the 50 year-old CEO who gets divorced and his kids hate him. I’ve worked with n = 3 people that get there, and they have all built billion-dollar empires.
Notice that these turnings flip back and forth from micro to macro.
Stage 1 is micro, your ability to focus within yourself to develop skills.
Stage 2 is macro, building a career/business that can house the ability for you to execute on your skills.
Stage 3 is micro, your ability to focus within people what actually matters, and build an internal (within your business) support system.
Stage 4 is macro, building a life that can house your business.
We all stumble because we’re naturally inclined towards one of these, and not the other.
The key to a great career life is being able to navigate all of them.
Asympathy
A word to describe a common experience of high level entrepreneurs (n > 200).
There is a kind of taking that is not greed and not even envy in the usual sense. People who have never had to protect a high-output life do not know what that life is made of. They experience their requests as ordinary: talk about my thing, sit in this mood, solve this tangle, be available in the way everyone else is. They do not see that an afternoon of being pulled off the work is not “an afternoon.” It is a break in the chain that produces books, businesses, championships, capital. It is cost-blind.
I call it asympathy.
It sounds like (a)sympathy, or being without sympathy.
But it’s actualy (asym)pathy, or asymmetric pathos.
Asympathy is the relational stance in which one person treats attention, access, and emotional labor as interchangeable across a large gap in operating cost. It is feeling and relating to another human being as if the costs (high, lows, and demands) are symmetric, when they are not. Which means the damage is disproportional to the intention.
Sometimes, we think that there may be solidarity in other “successful too” peer groups.
But consider Will and Jada Smith.
One could say that Jada, among other things, demonstrates asympathy towards Will.
“Just get a better peer group” doesn’t alleviate it.
The deciding factor is whether someone is a boon or a drain in the presence of someone else’s altitude.
The Squat World Champion
Fred Hatfield set a world record by squatting 1014 pounds. After the lift, a reporter excitedly ran up to him and asked “What was it like, lifting 1000 pounds?”
Fred asked in response, “How much can you lift?”
The reporter replied, “About 250 pounds.”
Fred then said, “It felt like what lifting 250 pounds feels like to you.”
The simple lesson here is “working at your capacity always feels like working at your capacity”.
But the business lesson is a bit deeper.
Growing a business, by definition, means always trying to push past your capacity. Every quarter can feel like “lifting 1000 pounds”.
What fellow business owners know is the same thing that athletes know: pushing past your limits isn’t a one-time event. It’s a lifestyle. The thousand-pound lift looks impressive, and it is. But it is the result of first having a limit of 250, 265, 300….all the way up to 1000, and continually breaking through those limits.
The difference between the reporter and the world champion is that the reporter leveled up 1 time, and the world champion leveled up 20 times.
The difference between a $1M business and a $10B business is that the founder had to level up 20 times.
“Having a $10B business must be nice. Very easy to coast. Why are they still working?”
Because it feels exactly as hard as having a $1M business. Now with just more on the line.
Understandably, most non-business owners can’t relate.
Why Business Leaders Play Poker
Journalist Maria Konnikova went undercover to understand how poker works. Going from never playing poker, she became an international champion. She had something interesting to say about what poker teaches you.
Most people rationalize their decisions by their outcomes. If you have a success, you congratulate yourself on having made a good decision. If you have a failure, you beat yourself up for having made a bad one.
In Poker, you can be dealt a great hand, make good decisions and still lose. Or, you can be dealt a bad hand and make bad decisions and still win.
Poker teaches you a different way to relate to outcomes. Be proud of yourself when you played the hand the best you could. Be tough on yourself when you didn’t, even if the outcome was good. Be humble in the face of both success and failure. And always always always remember, there’s another hand to play.
Business works in a similar way. You can have great funding, great employees, a great idea, and the business still fails (to turn a profit). Or, you can have all the cards against you, have no experience or skill in business, and still hit a home run.
So, if you want the lesson from poker (without playing for thousands of hours), here it is:
Being good at business means relating differently to success. Be proud of yourself when you made the best business decision you could. Be tough on yourself when you didn’t, even if the outcome was good. Be humble in the face of both success and failure. And always always always remember, tomorrow is a new day.
Quaverity
Chris McCarthy, head of Paramount and Yellowstone pusher, said this about streaming services: “I think the misconception was the winners are always going to be the ones with the most amount of content, when in fact the winners are gonna be the ones with the most mass hits. And what breaks through that clutter for most people is franchises.”
A franchise is not the point.
Creating something that resonates with people is.
I think the progression can be summarized like this:
- Quantity
- Quality
- Quaverity
We spend a lot of time in pursuit of more. Get more out of your day. Hustle more. Produce more content on more platforms to reach more people.
That may have worked 50 years ago. But we’re not in the industrial age anymore. The most successful people, teams, and brands don’t win on quantity.
We’ve learned that quality matters. When you google anything, if you’re not on the first page, you’re last. It’s the difference between being a New York Times bestseller and just another writer. In a world of (seemingly) unlimited quantity, quality makes you stand out.
Quality was the formula for success 20 years ago. Then ChatGPT came along. Now, anyone can produce quality. AI killed the information star.
So what’s next?
I think it’s quaverity.
What’s quaverity? It’s a word I made up that comes from quaver. Here’s my definition:
_Quaverity is the set of deep emotions, insights, commonalities, and metanarrative that, taken together, account for a consumer’s experience of content.
If a consumer (whether that’s an individual, a group, or a business) isn’t deeply affected by a product or service, then no quaverity exists for that consumer. _
Quaverity puts a value to how much an experience captures the heart and mind of a consumer.
Today, a franchise is a shadow of quaverity, something that signifies it’s existence. But just as it takes more than a great recording studio to make a hit song, it takes more than sequels and spinoffs to make something into a successful franchise. If it doesn’t move you emotionally, or spark epiphanies, or make your world make a little more sense, then there is no quaverity. At least not for you.
Franchises have quaverity. But so do viral videos. So does Eric Clapton’s Layla. It’s a quality we often ascribe to cult leaders and their followers: bizarre from the outside, but when you’re on the inside it grips you, if you’re the right person.
And here’s the thing: quality isn’t required. B-movies and William Hung have strong followings as well.
If the information age was ruled by quality, then the intelligence age is ruled by quaverity.
If you don’t have quaverity, then no amount of quality or quantity is going to help you.
What is AI's taste like?
The other day, I gave AI (grok) an excerpt from John Steinbeck.
It rated it a 6 out of 10 in terms of writing.
Steinbeck is a Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award winner.
Initially, the AI thought that I had submitted my own writing.
But that’s besides the point.
(Even after, this it said 6 out of 10 is what you would expect from a high school level student).
Taste is subjective.
It’s okay that AI gave Nobel/Pulitzer/National Award-level writing a 6 out of 10.
Just realize, it may not have the same taste as you do.
Make Desirable Things, or Make Things Desirable
What business is about, from Rory Sutherland, English advertising guru.
As an advertiser, he argues that making things desirable is underrated (of course).
But as a gross simplification:
- Product is making desirable things, Marketing is making things desirable.
- Working in your business is making desirable things, working on your business is making things desirable.
Gladwell would say that making desirable things is excellence criteria, while making things desirable is entrance criteria.
My take: most people are good at one or the other. Get good at what is natural to you.
Niches
A niche is a slice of the 8 billion people on this planet that you plan to serve.
A different way to think of it: a niche is a number.
“I serve gym owners making between $500k and $1M”.
According to Google, that’s 4,700 gyms in the world.
Do you plan to have 4,700 customers?
Most service businesses can’t literally serve all the customers in their niche.
Note that some outside that niche will be interested, too.
Breakdancing as the Blues
A lot of people consider swing dancing to be the spiritual successor to jazz.
But consider breakdancing. Breaking:
- Has a clear set of moves
- Crafted to be executed at a high level (where each move makes you think “wow, how did they do that?")
- That one curates into their own personal style
- Performed improvisationally
- With 4 categories of difficulty (toprock, footwork, power moves, freezes) that correspond to the 4 categories of difficulty of jazz (rhythmic, harmonic, technical, or tempo)
The process of development looks a lot like jazz (as defined by Wynton Marsalis):
- Improvisation as remixing (combining stuff you already know)
- Blues as a small set of meaningful vocabulary (as defined above)
- Swinging as in-time to the music
While tap and swing dance certainly have the musical lineage of jazz, breaking definitely has the blues.
Every Great Had An Injury or Episode
Exactly what the title says. Take any (okay, most) of the greats, and you’ll notice the pattern.
And not just “on the come up”. Once they were in full swing of their prime.
Athletes are overdone, so I’ll look at the artists:
- Van Gogh, mental breakdown and hospital stay. During and after, produced his most well-known paintings, including Starry Night.
- Matisse, intestinal cancer. After this, he created what are known as the best works of his career.
- Cole Porter, ridding accident. After this, he produced many famous Broadway plays, including Kiss Me, Kate.
- Adele, repeated vocal-cord hemorrhages, requiring tour cancelation and surgery. Still an incredible singer after.
- Ernest Hemingway, World War I wounds (1918) happened before the great novels.
- Stephen King, hit by a van in 1999. He later described the first session back as feeling like he had never written before. On Writing and the Dark Tower series (made into a movie) came out of that recovery.
The point isn’t that artists (or athletes) are cursed to have injuries.
And I’m not proferring platitudes about bouncing back.
Rather, here’s something more prosaic and mundane:
Accidents and setbacks happen; they are a part of life.
The greats just get back to work.