The Toolbox
Building Mental Models for Better Decisions
A book about the small number of mental models that actually change how you think — not the decorative ones that sound smart in meetings, but the load-bearing ones that make you measurably better at decisions, predictions, and problem-solving. Base rates. Bayesian updating. Second-order effects. Inversion. Opportunity cost. Regression to the mean. These aren't new ideas, but most people encounter them as vocabulary rather than as tools they actually use. This book makes them usable. Each chapter takes one model, shows what it looks like in practice across wildly different domains, and gives the reader enough reps that the model becomes instinct rather than trivia.
