I have been thinking about ‘thinking’ and lately have realized how some facts, information, experiences and wisdom acquired in the past have either been partially or completely wiped out from my working memory. When I re-read some of the old books that I had already read, they seem absolutely new to me. I continue to commit the same mistakes and prior experiences do not readily come handy to my rescue. The old adage,  ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’ makes a whole lot more sense at this stage of my life.

As a student most of my learnings were to get through the examination and probably I was at the peak of intelligence and effectiveness just a day before the examination and after that it’s all a downhill slide. Symbolically, I would go get a haircut to shed off the extra load not only of what I have accumulated outside but also what’s inside. I would also put in extra hours of sleep just to reboot my system and clear everything out of my RAM (my working memory).

The sense of losing what I had acquired the hard way and continuing to tread on the same path in the future is not a pleasant feeling and I decided to do something about it. The inspiration to be thoughtful and deliberate in structuring the learnings into easily recallable framework came from multiple sources notable among which include books and talks by Charlie Munger and Shane Parrish’s Farnamstreet Blog.

Charlie Munger explains:

“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”

Marcus Aurelius in his classic work Meditations explain:

“You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that.”

I have been noodling on the above ideas and trying to figure out a) how best to structure my learnings such that it does not again become an academic exercise of memorizing discrete sets of facts/information without any meaningful use and b) if I think of my mind or the thought process as the most valuable resource available to me, how do I ensure that I eliminate all inefficiencies and waste in the use of this resource. With these two questions, I started thinking about – how I think, what occupies my mind, how much of it is deliberate thinking and how much of it is inactive/uncontrolled rumination, how much of it really drives any impact and how much of it is just wishful daydreaming.

I observed myself for couple of weeks and tried to identify broad mental domains of cognitive activities that I actively and/or inactively engage in. The idea being, if and when I am aware of what I am thinking about, I should be able to build a mental framework of broad domains that are mutually exclusively and conclusively exhaustive. If I am able to successfully do that, I should be able to hang my key learnings, experiences, insights etc. on such a framework that not only would make intuitive sense but also would be of use in the daily activities reinforcing the freshness of concepts and usefulness of ideas. It would also help progressively eliminate wasteful mental activities that do not really add any value to my mental framework.

Below is the output of the self-observation exercise… my “Mental Models Framework”. Obviously this will evolve with me and I will continue to add various models, key learnings, insightful references within this framework. You will find the most updated ‘Mental Model Framework’ on an Index Page – here.

Ancient Sanskrit literature envisages three social debts one has to repay in this life. These Debts are termed as Trirunas (Three debts) – they are Deva runa (Debt to Gods for creating this world for you), Pitru runa (Debt to Ancestors for bringing you into this world) and Rishi Runa (Debt to Teachers or Sages for creation of knowledge that makes life meaningful). One repays debt to Gods by leading virtuous life, taking care of the nature / ecosystem and complying with the rules and rituals of the scriptures; Debt to Ancestors is repaid  by begetting children and turning them into good citizens and instilling in them age old values. Debt to the Teachers/Sages is repaid by sharing acquired knowledge with others for their betterment and for the benefit of the society.

This blog is my humble attempt to repay my debt to my teachers, mentors and every other person from whom I continue to learn.