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The concept of inverse thinking can help you with the challenge of making good decisions. The inverse of being right more is being wrong less. Mental models are a tool set that can help you be wrong less. They are a collection of concepts that help you more effectively navigate our complex world.

If we practice learning not as a pure accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to build up a latticework of theories and mental models to which information can stick, we enter a virtuous circle where learning facilitates learning.

We wish we had learned about these ideas much earlier, because they not only help us better understand what is going on around us, but also make us more effective decision makers in all areas of our lives.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stresses the importance of having a broad theoretical toolbox - not to be a good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality. He regularly explains to students which mental models have proven most useful to help him understand markets and human behaviour. He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking. The moment one starts to combine these mental models and attach one's experiences to them, one cannot help but gain what he calls "worldly wisdom." The importance is to have not just a few, but a broad range of mental models in your head. Otherwise, you risk becoming too attached to one or two and see only what fits them. You would become the man with a hammer who sees nails everywhere

You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head."

When you don't use mental models, strategic thinking is like using addition when multiplication is available to you.