Happy Saturday!
Today’s issue is about mental models and how they can help you become a super thinker.
Read time: 5 minutes
A mental model is a simple representation of how something works.
One such mental model is friction. Friction is “the resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another.”
If you ask yourself, does friction occur with more than just physical objects?
Immediately, you know the answer is yes and can think of situations where friction between people or ideas might occur.
This is the power of a mental model. It lets you quickly apply ideas from one domain to another.
The best book on this topic is Poor Charlie’s Almanack:
This book is about Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett’s business partner.
Charlie Munger is a polymath, investor, and one of the broadest thinkers I’ve ever encountered.
The key takeaway from the book is to hang your life experiences on a “latticework” of mental models in your mind (I recently built a spreadsheet with 150+ of these models).
These mental models are the “big ideas from the big disciplines”. Approaching problems through the lens of these 100+ mental models gets you to the “right answer” the vast majority of the time. They are a short-cut to super thinking.
As an example, you could look at your Salesforce environment as an ecosystem. That’s a mental model from biology.
In ecosystems, the animals and creatures who specialize in a niche often do very well. Specialization and niches both appear in biology as concepts which you can borrow as mental models for you career.
You may find that in your company, if you specialize in a specific niche of your Salesforce org, you will do very well too.
My niche was Salesforce flows. I got really good at building Flows and was able to advanced quickly through building useful automation.
For you, it could be flows too. It could also be:
1. Communicating requirements from the business to developers
2. Writing Code
3. A specific installed application, Conga for example, that enables you to provide value to the company in a way no one else can.
4. Analytics
5. Anything that looks like work to others, but feels like play to you
Conceptualizing your Salesforce environment as an ecosystem, and deciding to specialize in a niche that allows you to provide unique value will help you get raises and progress faster.
Other models include margin of safety from engineering, opportunity cost from economics, inversion from mathematics, reward / punishment super response from psychology.
I’ve used each of these models to conduct safe deployments, select which projects to prioritize, identify failure points in large builds, and design team compensation systems.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack gives an excellent framework for building your mental model repertoire in business and life. It has served me exceptionally well and so I pass it along to you.
The key takeaway from today’s issue:
1. Identify a niche you enjoy in the Salesforce ecosystem
2. Build a repertoire of the mental models
3. Use them routinely to solve problems!
And that’s it. See you next Saturday!
P.S.
Whenever you’re ready, feel free to check out my Salesforce Flow course on Udemy.
More students than ever before are enrolling in the course and the feedback has been outstanding.
Using the coupon and link here will give you the best possible price until the coupon expires in mid-August.
Best,
Nick
