Mental models of successful entrepreneurs.

• Second-order thinking. Ask "and then what?" — the consequences of the consequences.
• Opportunity cost. Every yes is a no to everything else. Buffett: "The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything."
• Circle of competence. Know the boundary of what you understand, and stay inside it for high-stakes bets.
• Scale economies shared (Sokol / Bezos). Pass cost savings to customers to widen the moat over time.
• Lollapalooza effects (Munger). When multiple forces push the same direction, outcomes compound non-linearly.
• Local vs global optimisation. The best move for one quarter often kills the long-term franchise.
• Asymmetric upside. Take bets where the downside is bounded and the upside is open-ended.
• Inversion. Solve "how to lose" first; avoiding stupidity beats seeking brilliance.

Read across disciplines — biology (selection, niches), physics (compounding, equilibria), psychology (incentives, bias), military history (strategy, attrition). Then force yourself to apply at least three different models to every important decision. The discipline matters more than the list.

No. Cognitive biases (anchoring, confirmation, recency) are predictable errors. Mental models are deliberate lenses you carry into a problem. Most great investors use models to neutralize biases.

Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett (latticework, circle of competence), Jeff Bezos (regret minimization, working backwards), Andy Grove (only the paranoid survive, strategic inflection points), and Kazuo Inamori (amoeba management). Each profile in this archive includes the operating concepts they returned to most often.