Great book. Straight to the point.

If you are a reader of the Farnam street blog, much of the content will be familar but this is a great way to have it condensed in one book.

The book is short, focused and gets right down to the mental models. Some of the popular mental models covered are

The Map is not the territory

circle of competence

First principles thinking

Second-order thinking

probabilistic thinking

Inversion

Easy to read and will teach you loads

Just finished reading Shane's book. If you're a reader of Farnham Street 'Brain Food' newsletter, many of the concepts and models covered in this book will be familiar. There are quite a number of books around on mental models but I need to point to this one as one that's both well written and readily accessible. Looking forward to part two which is due out soon, I believe.

This book is adapted from a series of blog posts, which makes it a good overview and quick read. Each chapter speaks to one mental model, describing it and then providing 2-3 examples from history. The only negative for me was that in a couple chapters I felt the examples were a bit of a stretch to support the theory he just defined. I didn’t quite believe it and he even acknowledges in one that he can’t truly know what led a historical figure to make a certain decision. Nothing in the book was brand new to me, but I liked the framing of each as mental models as I can now tie the concepts more neatly together when discussing with colleagues at work.

I really like Shane Parrish's way of writing makes it easier for me to understand and use the information to improve my life.

If you’ve lived a while and paid attention to the world this book will be more a summary of stuff you know, potentially with some labels you didn’t have eg Occam’s razor.

If you’re younger and just starting out in life, this book could provide some useful shortcuts to wisdom you might not already have. I wish I’d seen it in my 20s. In my 50s I’m nodding and saying “yep, seen that”.

Good book, but a bit overpriced. Same information can be obtained from various blogs. But it's nice to have it as a hardcopy.

A quick romp through some important tools for thinking with. Only four stars because it is so quick. Some sections are superficial and some require knowledge of US popular culture and sports personalities but these are tools everyone should know about. I had the Kindle edition. It worked well but some "sidebars" were a few pages away from where they were initially referenced. I will be reading the next volume in the series.

What a great book !

When you read these concepts you probably will not be surprised by the main ideas. However, the book does a good of fleahing out the details to make the concepts clear and memorable and proper caveats of when to use the ideas. Simple advice is usually easier to apply and stopping to actually use these precepts will improve your decision making.

Shane Parrish has written a gold mine book. The various mental models mentioned by him the book is useful to all and if put in use in our daily lives we can simplify most of the things in our lives. Decision making is one of the most difficult aspects in life but putting the mental models,mentioned by Shane in the book, in use can definitely help one to take good decisions in all aspects of life.

The book introduces mental models and establishes a foundation for its future volumes.

First of all, I am very disappointed with the quality of the second edition of the book I received from Amazon. It arrived in poor condition, appearing used with a worn cover, which has only deteriorated further over time. "The author thanks the publisher 'Cornerstone Press' in the acknowledgments, but in reality, there's nothing to thank them for. I can't remember the last time I encountered such poor quality in a book.

From reviews I read, I am not the only one complaining about it.

Speaking about the book itself, in my opinion, it didn't live to my expectations. There are a few mental models presented in the book. Some are explained really well some only shallowly. Compared to the book "Clear Thinking" it lacks a bit of depth and analysis.

The book itself is 4/5 but due to the print quality the overall score drops to 2/5.