26 published lessons with this tag.
Assumptions you never write down are assumptions you never question. Every plan, decision, and belief rests on invisible premises — and the invisible ones are the ones that destroy you.
A mental model you cannot draw is a mental model you cannot examine. The models that govern your decisions most powerfully are the ones you have never made visible — and therefore never inspected, never tested, and never improved.
A schema is a mental model that has been externalized, named, and structured so it can be examined, tested, and improved — turning invisible cognitive habit into visible cognitive infrastructure.
You already have schemas for everything — making them explicit is the work.
Your schemas determine what you notice and what you miss.
Your schema about a thing is never the thing itself — useful but always incomplete.
Multiple schemas can apply to the same situation and the one that wins shapes your response.
A schema that works in one context may fail entirely in another.
Operating on a flawed schema produces systematically flawed decisions.
Every category you create determines what you group together and what you separate.
If your schema is correct it should make accurate predictions about what will happen next.
Every schema has a shelf life. The mental models that made you effective last year will make you rigid this year — unless you build deliberate mechanisms for evolving them. Schema evolution is not optional maintenance. It is the core discipline that separates adaptive thinkers from intelligent people trapped in outdated frameworks.
Revising a model in response to evidence is the defining act of a strong thinker. The refusal to update is not confidence — it is cognitive debt accumulating interest.
Refusing to update schemas means making increasingly poor decisions over time. Rigid schemas do not merely fail to improve — they actively degrade your judgment, because the world changes while your models do not. Every day you operate on an outdated schema is a day your decisions drift further from reality. The cost is not a one-time penalty. It compounds.
How do you typically form new mental models? Understanding your process lets you improve it.
Define what makes a schema good — accuracy predictive power simplicity scope.
You need rules for choosing which schema to apply in a given situation.
Your model of how change happens determines how you approach change.
You can build schemas at different levels of abstraction each serving different purposes.
Individual schemas are more powerful when they connect into a unified understanding.
Connect what you know about work with what you know about relationships health and creativity. Domain boundaries are administrative conveniences, not real walls. The schemas you build in one area of life contain structural insights that transfer to every other area — but only if you deliberately practice moving knowledge across those boundaries. Integration across domains is what turns isolated expertise into a unified operating system for living.
When you connect your schemas you discover that many are variations of the same underlying idea.
Every agent embeds assumptions about the world — the schema it uses must be accurate.
Create a specific framework for each recurring decision type.
Real situations often involve several interacting feedback loops simultaneously.
Every agent is created, deployed, maintained, and eventually retired.