This week’s mental model is pulled directly from the great Shane Parish. His weekend post on “knowledge compounding” is similar to how I’m structuring my year. This year over each quarter I am doing a ‘crash course’ in some topic that I’m interested in. The first quarter is on behavioral economics, and I’ve selected 6 books to read over the three months. I finished Misbehaving last night, which gives a good history of the social science. Next up is Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow. Over the next three months it’s my hope that what I learn in these books will compound. I can get a longer half life of my knowledge when I’m able to contrast and compare different authors and studies, as well as putting the studies in a historical setting.
Finally, here is Parish on Buffet:
The biggest thing he’s done is to learn and create this cumulative base of knowledge in his head. One reason that he doesn’t use a computer is that in a sense, he is one. He also needs a computer to get…he uses it for news. He wants to know what’s going on in the world. So he is on the internet a lot to get news reports, and he’s up late at night seeing what’s going on. He doesn’t use it as a filing cabinet or for computation.