3 Mental Models to Think Like a Strategic Genius

I am a big collector of mental models. Those frameworks that we can use from different areas of life, different domains, we can pull them in as a sort of template and plug them into a unique situation, plug in the different variables, and out through that framework, out through that mental model will pop and answer a new perspective. I love this process of collecting interesting ideas and concepts that I can scaffold in to the lattice work of my neural net. And I want to share with you today three of the mental models that I have found the most value in in these last, I’d say, twelve months. These are three concepts, three frameworks you can apply in various situations that’ll bring you a ton of value if you can just think through them. And the reason this is so important is, as Charlie Munger said, you know, to the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So the more tools that we have, the more models, more frames that we can use, then the more perspectives we can bring, the more creative solutions we can find to a problem. And at the end of the day, that’s really all entrepreneurship is.

Building a business is nothing more than the systematic process of solving problems that deliver value to a target audience. That’s kind of it, right? So let’s talk about these. The first one is what I call the petri dish of serendipity. The petri dish of serendipity came to me when I was reading about Alexander Flank, who, back in the 1920s, discovered penicillin. Through complete happenstance, he left these petri dishes of bacteria out on his workbench when he went on vacation. When he came back, they were covered in this blue green algae. And what he discovered was that this algae was destroying the bacteria. So he, you know, he, he separated that, that contaminant, and he named it penicillium.

And penicillin, over the last, you, you know, 100 years, has saved literally millions of lives. It’s a completely, it gave birth to the whole, like, movement of antibiotics, and it fundamentally changed how we approached medicine in a lot of ways. And this is a perfect example of serendipity, a fortuitous event that came through pure chance. Right? And the thing about serendipity that I love as a concept is that it’s not something we can chase. We can’t pursue it, but we can cultivate the environment that makes it more likely to appear. And so we want to ask ourselves, what are those petri dishes of serendipity that we are stepping into in our own lives? My favorite one is networking events, going to networking events is the way I think about it, is I don’t know what I’m going to get out of it, but I’m going there because it’s a collision of so many different people, so many different opportunities, so many different pieces of information and perspectives and worldviews that surely out of that muck, something might fortuitously arise. Not always, but more often than you think. So, the petri dish of serendipity, the question to ask yourself is, how can I cultivate my environment in such a way as to increase the likelihood of getting lucky? That’s a really cool frame.
The second frame I want to share with you is the idea of laser like focus. For a really long time, I thought about laser like focus completely wrong. I had the wrong mental model. And this is a good example of how we can improve our quality of thinking by replacing, systematically replacing the frameworks we rely on. And the laser like focus model that I was using before was, I thought laser like focus was like the magnifying glass that we have as a child and using it to light a piece of paper on fire. My concept was it’s this highly concentrated beam of light, and that if you wanted to increase your focus, you just needed a bigger magnifying glass. Right? Like you needed to try harder and you could increase the beam, cut through your to do list, all the distractions, all those things. Right, but that’s the wrong way to think about laser like focus.
The better way is actually to go to the scientific roots of what a laser actually is. And see, this is something I didn’t understand before, is that a laser is not just a highly concentrated beam of light, it’s a beam of coherent light. So here’s how this works, is that imagine within a box, we have all these atoms, and this box has mirrors on all the different sides, okay? So we’re going to pour energy into that box, and something really interesting happens. A single atom, at some point will emit a photon. That’s a burst of light. And for whatever reason, all the other atoms will do the same thing. They will act incoherence. It’s a cascade.
It’s a waterfall. So now they’re all emitting these photons everywhere, right? So now these photons are bouncing off the mirrors, and they’re going every, every which way. And that as we insert more and more energy into this box, the atoms continue to emit more and more photons, and it goes crazy. These things are getting chaotic now. There’s energy just bouncing back and forth everywhere, and more photons popping out at every single second. And it’s creating what’s called coherence. And now that coherent beam of light, if we let a hole in the side of the box, will flow out, and that creates the laser. Now, the way that we can use this framework in our own life, the mental model is to ask ourselves, not, hey, how can I do this thing? How can I try harder at this thing? What would it look like to make this thing, you know, to get this thing done through sheer brute force? It’s more, how do I design the environment in such a way that would make this result inevitable, that it would make this result coherent? And that can often come through environment design, through team design.
But it forces you to approach the problem from a different perspective, rather than the perspective of just trying harder, which I find to be very valuable, specifically because growing up, everybody told me the Anthony doesn’t have the ability to focus. He just needs to try harder, blah, blah, blah. And that just never worked for me. But once I created my box of mirrors and figured out how to pour energy into the box and then direct the energy to man, that’s when everything really took off for me. Okay, third mental model I want to share with you is very cool. It’s called the ship of THeseus Paradox. So theseus was, you know, this greek hero from Way back when, and the. The Paradox goes like this.
The ship of Theseus, he is the ship that Theseus took to go do some, you know, things that Theseus did. He comes back from his heroic journeys. And the people of the town want to preserve this ship. So they keep it in the harbor, and they are maintaining it over the centuries. Well, as time goes bye, certain planks of wood rot. And so they replaced the plank of wood here, they replaced the plank of wood there, and then they replaced the mast and the sail. And over time, every single plank of wood, every mast, every sail is replaced. And so the question to ask yourself is, is that still the ship of Theseus? Let’s make it even more complicated.
What if we were to take every Beam of rotten wood, the rotten mast, all of that stuff, and reassemble the ship in the harbor right next to the other ship? Would that still be the ship of TheseuS? Which is the real ship of Theseus? This one or this one? It’s an interesting question, and it’s an interesting question because we as humans, go through the same exact thing, right? Every seven years, every cell in your body is replaced. It is duplicated, is changed. You are a different version of yourself at a cellular level 100% through and through than you were just seven years ago. And every day we’re going through the same transition. Your hair is growing, your fingernails grown. You’re getting bigger, bigger, getting smaller. You’re constantly going through this transformation, and the question is, are you still you? At which point do you stop being you and become this new thing? At which point did that ship of Theseus stop being the ship of Theseus? Was it the moment the first plank of wood was replaced? Was it the moment that 51% of the ship was replaced? At what point is it no longer the same ship? And it’s such an interesting concept to use in the framework of your identity and who you are, to realize that there is no past you, no future you, no present you. There is just this constantly evolving you.

And the beauty of this mental model is to realize, whether it’s in you or your business or in life in general, is that there is no fixed state. It’s not this static thing. It’s this constant evolution, this constant change. And you ask yourself, what is that thing evolving into? That is the power of this framework. So those are three of my favorite mental models. I hope this brings you a little bit of value that you can apply into your own life, into your own business. If it did, let me know. Shoot me a review.

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