A living collection of mental models I run my life on. Each one is a lens — distilled from podcasts, books, and my own essays, then stress-tested against my own work and life.
Not a blog. Not a quote dump. Not a productivity listicle.
This is the working knowledge base I actually use to make decisions. Each entry is one mental model — a single reusable lens — written in a fixed shape:
- One-sentence tagline. If I can't compress the idea into one sentence, I haven't understood it yet.
- In the wild. Verbatim quotes from the source, with a link to the episode. Attribution matters; paraphrase is how ideas get corrupted.
- 中文解释 / Why it matters. What I actually took from it — where it applies, how it fails, how it connects to other models.
- Related. Links to adjacent models. The value isn't in any single lens; it's in the lattice.
If a model can't earn its place in the lattice, it gets cut.
I update this continuously. New models land when I find one that survives contact with reality. Existing models get rewritten when a better frame shows up, or when I discover I was wrong. Models that don't earn their keep get deleted. Watch or star the repo if you want to follow along.
You can also read individual entries straight from the source tree — they're plain Markdown, no tooling required.
| # | Model | One-liner |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Attention as Capital | Attention is more valuable than capital — capital flows toward it, not the reverse. |
| 2 | Barrels, Not Ammunition | Org capacity = number of people who can drive initiatives fire-and-forget, not headcount. |
| 3 | Conflict, Struggle, Love | Stories travel on emotion. The ones that spread carry conflict, struggle, or love. |
| 4 | How Hard Could It Be? | Start. Fix things as they break. Don't pre-simulate the pain. |
| 5 | Lean into Polarization | The haters and the lovers come from the same intensity. Dilute toward the middle and you lose both. |
| 6 | Naturally vs Artificially Selected | Gameable filters produce fragile winners. The alpha is in people the filter misses. |
| 7 | No Days Off | You're not practicing discipline — you're refusing to negotiate. A hard rule is cheaper than a daily one. |
| 8 | Proof of Possibility | The most durable content isn't information — it's evidence that the audience's situation is escapable. |
| 9 | Push Harder When Winning | Talented people's morale drops in coasting, not in struggle. Press hardest when things look best. |
| 10 | Show Your Steps | If you can't walk someone through every step, you don't know it — you only think you do. Language is the verifier. |
| 11 | The 60/40 Rule | Healthy relationships aren't 50/50 ledgers. They're competitions to out-give. |
| 12 | Steering Wheel vs Passenger | In large change, there are only two positions: grab the wheel or crash. Passive is the crash option. |
| 13 | Taste as Moat | When AI commoditizes "smart," taste becomes the scarce edge. |
| 14 | Tempo as Signal | The earliest signal of a great company isn't strategy — it's the cycle time from "noticed" to "shipped." |
| 15 | Do It, Let Someone Else Do It, or Drop It | Anxiety has no fourth option. Either you do it, or someone else does, or you let it go. |
Three ways, pick whatever fits.
- Browse the table above. Skim the one-liners; click anything that pulls you in.
- Walk the lattice. Open any entry and follow its
Related:links. The connections are where the real model lives. - Search by situation. Making a hiring call? See Barrels, Not Ammunition and Naturally vs Artificially Selected. Feeling stuck? Do It, Let Someone Else Do It, or Drop It and How Hard Could It Be?. Things going too well? Push Harder When Winning.
Every quote links back to the original. Current models draw mainly from:
- Lenny's Podcast — Hard truths about building in the AI era (Keith Rabois)
- Lex Fridman Podcast #494 — Jensen Huang (NVIDIA)
- 20VC — Jake Paul & Geoffrey Wu on attention vs cash
- A handful of my own essays (referenced by date in the source frontmatter)
I cite, I don't paraphrase. If a quote is here, it's verbatim; the commentary around it is mine.
Content: CC BY-NC 4.0 — feel free to share, adapt, and build on any of this for non-commercial use, as long as you attribute it back here. For commercial use, get in touch first.
Quoted passages remain the property of their original authors and are used under fair use for commentary and criticism.
If one of these models helped you — or broke for you — I'd like to hear about it. Open an issue.
— JH