Readers often ask me that I work very hard, but the results are always unsatisfactory. What is the problem?
Although there are many key factors to success, in the final analysis there are only two points, namely making a game and breaking a game. That is, how to see through the traps others have played for you? How to cleverly set up situations for others?
The key to making and breaking a game lies in your thinking ability. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, very classic thinking tools and methods such as structured thinking, systematic thinking, and in-depth thinking can help you improve your thinking ability.
In addition to thinking on our own, we also need to learn from more previous thinking to improve the quality of thinking. This is the model thinking that this article will talk about.
What is "model thinking"?
Simply put, model thinking is a way of thinking that abstracts experiences and uses them to solve practical problems. The proverbs, formulas, and theorems you usually hear are essentially model thinking.
For example, "Three stooges are more powerful than Zhuge Liang", which reveals that working together as a team is much more effective than working alone.
For another example, the law of "universal gravitation" explains: No matter what you let go of, it will definitely fall to the ground.
Therefore, model thinking is a shortcut for humans to understand the complex world. We summarize the rules from experience, and then abstract the rules into proverbs, formulas, and laws that can be clearly expressed. These condensed experiences are model thinking.
"Model thinking" all have three characteristics: first, simplification, removing certain details; second, logical; third, models are not comprehensive.
The world we live in is very complex, and there is no way to explain and understand it with one or two "model thinking", so we need to use multi-model thinking. Multi-model thinking is the ability to abandon habitual experience and switch to thinking logic.
In order to better understand "model thinking", let's first look at a story:
About 100 years ago, residents of the eastern United States began to migrate to mountainous cities in the west. As soon as they moved here, they discovered a problem: the forest here caught fire at every turn. Causes include dry trees, lightning strikes, or other natural causes.
So, as soon as they discovered a fire, they immediately put it out. But after doing this, strange things happened. Every once in a while, a huge fire would occur, burning the mountains and fields and causing heavy losses.
Later, experts were invited to help them solve this problem. After some investigation, the experts gave advice: Don't put out small fires in the future, just let them burn.
People didn't understand and thought this was stupid, but there was no better way. They could only do it with the mentality of giving it a try. As a result, there has never been a super big fire since then.
If you don't put out small fires, you can put out super big fires. Why is this?
It turned out that after analysis, experts found that two conditions are needed for a large fire to occur: first, there must be a sustained strong wind that blows throughout the entire forest; second, there must be enough fuel, that is, dry trees.
In the past, people put out small fires as soon as they were discovered, resulting in many dry trees being preserved. When strong winds came, as long as there was a spark, the dry trees would be instantly ignited, causing super fires.
So, why didn’t the previous residents think of this as the reason? In fact, they were kidnapped by their existing experience. They used to live in the eastern United States. The mountainous areas were very humid. Dead trees usually rotted in the soil, or were severely damp and would not burn at all. So they put out the fire at the first sight, no problem.
But after coming to the west, the climate was dry and dead trees did not emit moisture, so they became fuel, leading to the occurrence of super fires. In other words, the environment has changed, the premise has changed, and the traditional fire-fighting model no longer works.
Through this story, you can easily understand "model thinking". Through in-depth thinking, analysis, and abstraction of things, you can form "model thinking" for problems in a certain field. Model thinking is very effective in solving similar problems. When the external environment and internal factors change, "model thinking" also needs to be changed to find the most effective way to solve the current problem.
It can be seen that if you want to become a master in solving problems, then you must master enough model thinking. Because only by mastering multi-model thinking can we abandon our inherent experience and switch thinking models according to the actual environment, so that problems can be solved easily.
In Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanac", he once mentioned the 100 most classic types of model thinking in various disciplines. Here are a few common ones to share with you:
1. Power law distribution
To put it simply, it is winner-take-all. For example, in the entertainment industry and Internet celebrities, it is a power law distribution model. A few big stars and Internet celebrities occupy a large number of fans.
Correspondingly, it is a normal distribution. For example, in a class, there are only a few people with top grades and poor grades, and most people are in the middle, neither too good nor too bad.
Knowing the power law distribution and normal distribution, you will be able to make more reasonable judgments in work and life. For example, is the industry you are in a winner-takes-all type, or is it a profit-sharing type? If you are in the media, then this industry belongs to a power law distribution. A few leading companies occupy a large number of user resources, so you should go to the leading companies as much as possible; and if you are in a clothing company, then this industry is It belongs to the normal distribution. As long as you do a good job in design and quality, you can occupy your own market. Because clothing pursues personalization, it is difficult to be the only one.
You may ask, how do I know whether my industry has a power law distribution or a normal distribution? It's very simple. Look at the industry analysis report. The market share occupied by the top companies is clearly written.
2. Shapley model
This was invented by economist Lloyd Shapley. It is used to calculate the average contribution of a person to the team.
For example: the product manager's salary is 10,000, and the programmer's salary is 10,000. Then there is an employee who understands both products and development. What should his salary be? You might say 20,000. However, that's not what Lloyd Shapley calculated. What he calculated was what would happen if you were one more person on the team?
Everyone knows that in software development, product managers and programmers must be present at the same time to develop products. If there is an employee Xiao Ming who understands both products and development, he can create value in four situations: in the first case, recruit products first and then recruit Xiao Ming; in the second case, recruit first development, and then recruit Xiao Ming; in the third case, recruit Xiao Ming first, and then recruit products; in the last case, recruit Xiao Ming first, and then recruit developers. And someone who only understands products or development is not as valuable as him in the above four situations.
Therefore, according to the calculation method of the "Shapley Model", the salary of a person who understands both products and development should be: 2000 X 4 = 8000. Although in the real world, your boss won't do this to you, you have to know that the value of "talented talents" is actually very high.
As an employee, you can learn some other skills based on the "Shapley Model" to enhance your workplace value.
3. Network model
This model is very simple, that is, in human society or the Internet world, the more connection points a person has, the greater the influence.
Let’s think about a question first: If you were an employee in the advertising department of a food company, when you launched a new product, who would you first send the product to for trial? Are they loyal users, target users, or gourmets?
The answer is to send products to opinion leaders.
So, what is an opinion leader? They are people with greater influence, such as: food bloggers, well-known hosts, even school teachers, administrators of a certain community, etc. What they have in common is that they have a strong social network. By connecting with people through media platforms, social software, offline activities, etc., these people have greater influence.
4. Prospect Theory
Prospect theory is an important thinking model for risky decision-making. It was proposed by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Kahneman. It describes and predicts people's behavioral theory in the process of making risky decisions.
The analysis framework of prospect theory reveals the public's decision-making preferences: most people are risk-averse when faced with gains; most people are risk-preferential when faced with losses; people are more sensitive to losses than gains.
Specifically, there are the following five manifestations:
1) Determine the effect. "Two birds in the bush are worth one in the hand." Between certain benefits and "taking a gamble", most people will choose the certain benefits, which is the mentality of settling for peace of mind.
2) Reflection effect. When making a choice between a certain loss and "taking a gamble", most people will choose to "take a gamble".
3) Loss aversion. The happiness brought by picking up 100 yuan for nothing can hardly offset the pain caused by losing 100 yuan.
4) Obsessed with small probability events. Many people have bought lottery tickets. Although the winnings may be very small and 99.99% of your money may support welfare and sports, there are still people who are lucky enough to take advantage of small-probability events.
5) Reference dependencies. Most people's judgments of gains and losses are often based on reference points. For example, in "Others earn 60,000 yuan a year, you earn 70,000 yuan a year" and "Others earn 90,000 yuan a year, but you earn 80,000 yuan a year." In the multiple-choice question, most people will choose the former, even if in terms of absolute income, the latter is obviously more.
Above we have introduced four common types of model thinking. In fact, there are many more classic model thinking in various disciplines. You can learn and apply them according to your own needs.
The above content is excerpted from the best-selling book "The Way of Cultivation of Technicians" by Huang Zhekeng, who has served as Vice President of Technology at Yiyao.com, CTO of Haier Agricultural E-commerce, CTO of Zhongtong Commercial, and Technical Director of No. 1 Store. He has published the best-selling book "Technology". "Top of Management"; founder of the technology media "Technical Leadership", with 300,000 fans across the network; good at corporate digital transformation, technical personnel growth, new technology application and innovation, etc.
