Shadowing Practice: 9 Mental Models You Can Use to Think Like a Genius - Learn English Speaking with Video

In this video, you'll learn nine different mental models that you can use to solve difficult problems, see the world in ways that no one else could even fathom, and all around just improve how you think.

If you're wondering what a mental model is, it's simply a representation of how the world works.

We operate in a very complex world, and it's impossible to truly understand all the different intricacies of everything that we experience.

So in order to help us, we use these different models and ideas that we do understand to aid us in learning about the things that we don't understand.

Here's a quick example.

Let's say an environmentalist, a botanist, and a business person walk into a forest.

They're all going to focus on different things.

The environmentalist may focus on the impact of climate change.

The business person is probably going to look at the forest and see the immense value of the land, and the botanist is going to focus on the ecosystem.

Each person essentially is simplifying the innate complexity of the forest into something that they can understand with the limited knowledge that they have.

While doing this isn't necessarily bad, what they see is entirely limited to what they know and therefore they can't see the full scope of the forest.

So one thing they may end up doing is sharing their specialized knowledge with each other.

This creates a scenario where each person develops a much more well-rounded understanding of the forest.

This is exactly what you do with mental models.

You learn the fundamental concepts of other disciplines to help give you a bigger toolbox, if you will, to sort of see the world through.

The more models you have, the more lenses you can use while you look at the world, and therefore the fewer blind spots that you end up having.

So now that you understand what a mental model is and the importance of using all of these different models throughout your life, let's learn what some of those models actually are and how you can use them.

One of the most important mental models to learn is map is not the territory.

This model teaches that the representation of reality is not actual reality.

Even the best maps are imperfect because they are naturally reductions of what they represent.

if a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity it would no longer be a reduction of the thing it would

just be the thing like like imagine trying to navigate new york with a map the size of new york in your pocket

there are just so many obvious reasons why that won't work at a more practical level the graph or the spreadsheet of the

financials of the company isn't actually the financials of the company so it doesn't accurately represent the real important numbers and the dollars in your bank account.

The information about a project from your direct report isn't the actual project.

So before making decisions based on these assumptions and maps and reports and summaries, you have to ensure that you understand 100% that the reduction of the thing is not the thing.

So make sure you get familiar with the actual territory before you make an important decision and not just go based on whatever the map is saying.

Circle of competence is simple.

Each one of us through our experience and our study has built up useful knowledge knowledge on different areas of the world.

Some of those areas are inside of our circle of competence and these are the things that we understand well.

If you work as a marketing director, marketing is probably within your circle of competence.

Product might be around the edges and engineering is well outside of your circle of competence.

So now when you make a decision, you can evaluate where the scope of that decision lies relative to your circle of competence.

If it If the decision falls inside of it, you can make the decision with the confidence knowing that you have the expertise to make the decision.

If the decision falls outside of the scope of your circle of competence, that's when you can consult an expert whose circle of competence contains that decision.

Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, put it best when he said, I'm no genius.

I'm smart in spots and I stay around those spots.

We should all aim to do the same.

Almost everyone can anticipate the immediate results of their actions.

This type of first-order thinking is easy and safe, but it's also a way to ensure that you get the same results that everyone else does.

Second-order thinking is thinking further ahead and thinking holistically.

It not only requires us to consider our actions and their immediate consequences, but also the consequences of those consequences.

There's a really famous story about this that is now called the cobra effect and it's about in the 1900s British colonials ruled India at the time but there was a massive cobra problem.

They were just everywhere.

What the government did was they decided to pay citizens to kill snakes.

So citizens would kill the snakes and then bring them to the government and they get paid for it.

Kind of like a bounty system.

What ended up happening was the citizens just started breeding snakes so they could kill them to make more money.

Once the government found out about this and ended the bounty program the citizens now had no need for all these newborn snakes so they just

let them loose in the street making the cobra problem even worse off than it was before this story illustrates the perfect example of

what happens when someone doesn't consider the second order effects of their decisions you might be wondering where i'm getting this content from and it's from

our actual books we've written three books on mental models and how to use them in your life we've also written hundreds of blog posts on our site fs.blog so if So if you want to learn more about any of these and go into more detail,

you can visit our site, again that's fs.blog, or you can visit the link, it's linked down in the description below.

Probabilistic thinking is essentially trying to estimate, using some tools of math and logic, the likelihood of any specific outcome happening.

The world, as complex as it is, is very rarely black and white.

So instead of deciding things as either happening or not happening, probabilistic thinking encourages us to assign a probability estimate to that thing happening to get a more accurate result.

As a simple example, let's say you read a headline in a local paper that says car break-ins on the rise.

Now, without thinking probabilistically, you probably might start freaking out about leaving your car parked on the side of the street.

But using probabilistic thinking, you can add a little bit more context to this.

For example, let's say you know that violent crime has been declining to its lowest rates in decades.

Your city is now safer than it has been ever.

Let's also say that the chance of your car getting broken into last year was 1 in 10,000, or 0.01%.

The article states, with accuracy probably, that this type of crime has doubled.

It is now 2 in 10,000, or 0.02%.

Now is that worth being terribly worried about?

Probably not.

The prior information here is key.

When we factor it in, we realize that our safety isn't really being compromised.

Inversion is a powerful tool to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove different obstacles to success.

As a thinking tool, it means approaching a situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point.

When most of us start a new project, we like to think about what success would look like and then we set the goals and priorities around getting there.

Using inversion though, you think about what failure would look like and what might cause that.

Then you set goals and priorities to ensure you avoid whatever it is that might cause that failure.

Instead of thinking about success and aiming for whatever that looks like, you think about failure and make sure you stay away from whatever that looks like.

Charlie Munger has famously said, all I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.

Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones.

This is the essence of Occam's razor, a classic principle of logic and problem solving.

Instead of wasting your time trying to disprove very complex and intertwined scenarios, you can make decisions more confidently by basing them on the explanation that has the fewest moving parts.

A simple example of Occam's razor is used to find the truth among conspiracy theories.

Most conspiracy theories have many complicated and interwoven threads that seemingly paint a bigger picture, but for conspiracy theory to be true, all of those individual threads need to be proven 100% accurate.

That's really hard to do.

It's much simpler and much more rational, honestly, to assume the logical explanation because it has fewer dependencies.

For example, the Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking is pretty cut and dry.

There's not many dependencies.

On the other hand, a lot of things had to have happened for the Freemasons to cause the sinking of the Titanic, which is believed by some.

Doctors often look for the simplest solution to an ailment, and scientists usually start with the least complicated hypothesis to disprove, and then they go from there.

Another helpful razor is Hanlon's razor.

This model says that we should not attribute to maliciousness that which is easily explained by incompetence.

Essentially, just because someone does something that makes you mad or upsets you doesn't mean they're out to get you like we so often believe.

It's far more likely that they are just ignorant of something or something else is going on in their life.

For example, if a good friend hasn't responded to your messages lately, using Hanlon's razor we can assume it's far more likely that they are busy with work or something personal came up than it is that they no longer want to be your friend

reciprocity or the principle of reciprocation if we want to get super fancy it states that for every action there is an equal and

opposite reaction in life the same is true if you treat someone with kindness odds are they are going to reciprocate kindness back to you but the opposite is also true.

If you treat someone poorly, you can't be surprised when they do the same to you.

Reciprocity prompts us to rewrite the golden rule a little bit, saying, do unto others knowing that something will be done unto you.

Activation energy is a model from chemistry, and it tells us that a chemical reaction needs a certain amount of energy before it can begin working.

One way to increase energy in a chemical reaction is with a catalyst.

This is something that can be added to a reaction to lower the activation energy that is required.

Using this practically in our lives, we can identify some catalysts like coffee or inspiration even that make doing hard work or a big project easier.

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Writing a long paper is a really difficult task and takes a lot of activation energy to start and get going.

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If you drink coffee, you can help lower that activation energy and get you going a lot quicker.

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When someone you know is struggling to get started on a project or finish a project, try to identify what's causing so much activation energy to be required and see if you can somehow lower that threshold.

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Thank you.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: 9 Mental Models You Can Use to Think Like a Genius - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is the Shadowing Technique?