How to Use Mental Models as A Masterplan for Unf*ckwithability
A personal skunkworks to help make your creative project unstoppable
The term skunkworks was created during World War II during a secret jet fighter project. The term means a loosely-structured team with the sole purpose of highly-productive, radical innovation.
As creators we’ve got one arm in the fire and the other towards the sky.
If we’re not neck-deep in our work we’re busy promoting it. If we’re not promoting our work our business doesn’t thrive. And that’s the rub. Our job is not only to finish our current work, but to develop innovative projects no one’s seen before.
If we’re not growing we’re dying.
So, how do we grow creatively if we’re busy doing our current work and marketing said current work in any spare time we’ve got left? Answer: We carve ourselves thirty minutes a day.
Now these aren’t just any thirty minutes. This is a dedicated, radical innovation brain storming session.
We’ll use this time for growing our work to a new level. Our personal skunkworks will help shape our creative work to come. We’ll figure out which paths to follow and which to avoid. We’ll dig deep into the analytical, conscious side of our minds and give our unconscious powerhouse food for thought — literally.
Mental models explained
A mental model is what it sounds like. This is a thought exercise. You put an idea in, kick its tires, check under the hood, and runt it through your though experiment to see how it fares.
These may be the most-lucrative moments of your day.
The famed other half of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, is famous for his mental models. He claims there are approximately 100 of them. I wrote a few posts about cognitive biases (see below), which you can also use to help adjust your mental models. Mental models and cognitive biases are intertwined.
Charlie talks about the model of self-interest, where the person who generates an idea assumes if they like something their idea will be good for other people too. Munger speaks of squelch by denial, where humans will squelch anything that interferes with their own self-interest or income.
How does this have anything to do with your creative work?
This is just the beginning. Munger’s models are financial. They’re an example. Your mental models will differ based on your craft. If this all sounds confusing, I’ll try and explain it differently.
A mental model, or thought experiment is the process of removing emotion from an idea and running it through a series of mental checkpoints to prevent yourself from chasing a bad idea, or from ignoring a good one.
We’ll get into the techniques I use in a minute.
Professional athletes use mental models. They ‘play the tape,’ which means they project a mental movie of themselves making the shot, kicking the ball, or sinking the basket, before they set foot on the court. They play the tape repeatedly until their brain thinks it’s true.
Albert Einstein is famous for his thought experiments. Modern physics would still be sucking its thumb if Einstein hadn’t spent so much time since age sixteen, sitting and thinking.
The best part is, anyone can practice thought experiments.
You don’t have to be a pro athlete or Einstein. You’re a creator. Your job is to develop the next novel idea for the audience you serve. If you’re first, you win the biggest prize. First isn’t always the best but if you can think your way through all the hurdles of a project, you’ll shortcut your way towards a successful end.
How to run your own thought experiments
You don’t need more than thirty minutes of quiet, a yellow pad, and a pen. The pen and paper are for the end of the process, not the beginning. The hard work is done in your mind.
There are few real gems in Napoleon Hill’s (the now debunked as largely-fictitious) Think and Grow Rich, but one of said gems is hidden. Most people ignore it, but it will have a profound effect on your life. This is called sitting for ideas.
Hills mentions a doctor who has a special room, or closet, in his house. The room has nothing but a lamp, a table and chair, and a notepad. The doctor placed a problem in his mind, and sat in the dark as his subconscious rumbled through the issue.
Once the doctor found an epiphany (literally, the light would go on), he turned on the light and feverishly wrote his discovery.
There are many famous thinkers who used a pen or a fistful of ball bearings in their hand. They’d sit for ideas and wait until they nodded off to sleep. When the ball bearings hit the floor and woke the person up, he’d jot down his thoughts.
You can take walks.
You can think in the shower.
You can meditate on it.
You can do this while driving.
To prevent yourself from daydreaming and getting yourself lost in useless thought, I believe it’s important to have two ground rules with thought experiments:
- Focus on a single problem.
- Let the process do the work. You can’t force innovation.
Focus on one idea
The single idea is the food for your mental model. This is the big question you’ll stick in the ‘input’ window and all your great thoughts will come out the ‘output’ door on the other side.
This is an exercise in extreme mindfulness. If you allow yourself to daydream beyond the one idea, you’ll lose the power of the process. Thinking for thirty minutes is a long time, so be patient with yourself. Maybe start with five minutes.
Let the process do the work
If you go into your thought experiment with an answer you don’t need to do the experiment, right? Mental models are heavy thought exercises, used to prove our bad ideas wrong and tease our good ideas out.
You won’t come up with a new idea every thirty minute session. Einstein worked on some of his though experiments for years. So, give yourself a break.
Find a place where you won’t be interrupted
Your subconscious mind loves motion. Sitting may not be the best situation if you’re really stuck for ideas. Even a rocking chair is better. Try taking walks, running — anything with motion.
No idea is a bad idea — until it is
Idea generation is part of the mental model. Let your mind think of new ways to solve the problem. Later, put each idea through the ringer, challenging our cognitive biases that everything we create is gold.
We allow every idea a chance in the arena. Then, we’re ruthless on each idea until the best one is left standing.
All this thinking takes time. Allow the process to work. You don’t need many game-changing thought to change your life and work.
Now what?
OK, you’ve come up with a idea. Good for you. Now we come to the tough bits — the part where all the thinking goes away. This is the part where we take action.
I really like the 5–95 rule from Evan Carmichael.
He says, “spend five percent of your time thinking, strategizing, planning. And then ninety-five percent of your time DOING.”
You spend your thirty minutes ‘experimenting,’ but the rest of your work day creating, making, and doing. We don’t get anything from our thoughts and ideas if we don’t implement them.
I’ll use the example with writing. I might come up with fifty new story ideas a week, but if I don’t grab one, tackle it, and hold it down until the story is written, the ideas don’t mean anything.
This is the curse of the creator.
We’re idea machines. The ideas are rarely the problem. Finding the right idea and coupling said idea with the right action, is what makes us unstoppable.
Develop the daily habit of your personal skunkworks.
You scan your high-clearance ID badge, crawl inside your own head, greet your team of one, and run your mental models until you’ve developed an idea we’ve never seen. Run the idea through the gauntlet. You’ll be surprised with what you come up with.
You’ve got this. They won’t know what hit ‘em.
Your next great idea is already inside you. Cool, huh?
All you’ve got to do is tease it out and act upon it.
We need your best creative work. We need your innovative ideas. We need you to make something better tomorrow than you made today. When you’re ready, it’s time to gather your tribe, using the post below.
We’re waiting for you.
August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.
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