Mental Model Mixtape

Combining mental models is like a good OutKast song

Welcome to the Metro Boomin x 21 Savage collab of mental models. Like combining two frozen leftovers, mental models tastefully combined are always more delightful.1 

Audience of One + 1,000 True Fans

Audience of One

This is the classic idea that writing2 with an audience of one person in mind helps streamline the creative process. When I’m writing a piece, I have one or two specific readers in mind that I know will get something out of it.

1,000 True Fans

You only need 1,000 true fans paying you $100/year to make $100,000/year. Kevin Kelly wrote an essay about this topic that was popularized by Tim Ferriss and his disciples.

Over a decade later, Li Jin wrote an essay titled 100 True Fans that propagates the idea that due to the rise of the creator economy and crypto, it will be more frequent that creators can make a living from $1,000/year via 100 true fans.

Mixed: 1-to-1,000

Write for an audience of 1 for long enough and you will gain an audience of 1,000 likeminded individuals. The odds of your audience of one having similar taste to 1,000 other people on the internet is incredibly high.

This is what happened to author Venkatesh Rao and his blog Ribbonfarm. I’ve been reading a lot of his work lately, so I forget which piece he mentions this, but he said something along the lines of, I write for a very specific, strange type of person and there happens to be a lot of those people out there.

Pygmalion Effect + Mimetic Desire

Pygmalion Effect

18 months ago while studying English at Rutgers University, I read Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. In the play, a poor flower shop girl is tutored by a high-class man until she is unmistakably part of the London elite.

I jumped into tech twitter and started seeing threads mentioning the Pygmalion Effect in relation to management and employee performance and I was shocked to figure out they were talking about this silly little play.

But, yes, the threadbois were talking about the Pygmalion Effect, the idea that higher expectations lead to an increase in performance.

Mimetic Desire

Created by Stanford professor Rene Girard and popularized by his student Peter Thiel, mimetic desire is the idea that we mimic our desires from our role models’ desires.

This phenomenon is not necessarily a bad thing although not being aware of it can have drastic consequences. Think about the kid wanting to get high because his more popular classmates want to get high.

But, combine the Pygmalion Effect and Mimetic Desire and you can actually have some pretty good shit happen.

Mixed: Mimetic Pygmalion Effect

Back in high school, I had a brilliant friend named Robert who was the valedictorian and was very competitive when it came to grades. I’m talking spreadsheet-of-grades kinda competitive.

Anyways, our friend group looked up to Robert and secretly wanted to be like him and so we did what any nerdy teenagers do and copied his desires for academic greatness.

I 100% pushed myself harder in school because of Robert. Like a sprinter pacing Roger Bannister to achieve a sub-4-minute-mile, he taught me to reach for greatness.

When other people we respect desire and expect higher performance, we push ourselves to desire and expect higher performance from ourselves.

What I loved about Robert was his shameless desire to be the best at what he did. He was cocky and potentially a sociopath, but hey, who isn’t at 16?

Check out yesterday’s podcast with Jake from PodofJake. He’s a pseudonymous creator who has managed to interview Vitalik Buterin, Balaji Srinivasan, and Mark Cuban.

Critical Mass + Pareto Efficiency

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80-20 rule. The idea is that 20% of your inputs cause 80% of your outputs. Think about a salesman who has five clients with the largest one making up 80% of the revenue.

I’ve also been thinking about the Pareto Principle in regards to fitness and health; from simply cutting carbs and exercising 45 minutes per day, I’ve lost 15 pounds in the last six months.

Out of an entire day, eating and exercising probably makes up 2 hours or 12% of my 17 waking hours per day. These important tasks are high-leverage and caused a significant amount of my weight loss.

Activation Energy

I’m no physics buff, but from what I understand, activation energy is the minimum energy which must be available to a chemical system with potential reactants to result in a chemical reaction.

What’s important here is the minimum energy part.

Mixed: Pareto Energy

Ok, this kinda sounds like something a frat bro would say. “Yo dude, you’ve got some real Pareto energy.” But, I was once a frat bro so I love it.

In this melting pot of mental models, Pareto Energy is the least amount of work you need to do in order to cause a very high-leverage result.

For example, when I was working for a DAO called Cabin, I was put in charge of the newsletters. All I needed to do to earn $500 was put the tasks on the board and check in with writers every Sunday.

I could have done way more like checking in with the writers a few days prior or editing the newsletter more thoroughly, but the above actions would be considered the Pareto Energy for this particular job.

I’m sure you could probably find the tasks at your current role that hold most of the Pareto Energy.

Product Market Fit + Clarke’s Third Law

Product Market Fit

Ah, the elusive idea of product market fit. It’s the unicorn that births new unicorns. Product market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand.

If there is no market fit for a product, then it won’t sell. Basically, no one wants your shit because either your product is shitty, useless, too expensive, or you’re too early/late in the game.

If there’s a really strong product market fit, you’ll see lines out the door.

Clarke’s Third Law

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

- Arthur C. Clarke

Teslas are magic to me. Hell, the laptop I’m writing on is magic. I have no idea how it works and I’m cool with that. It’s just too advanced, but it works.

Melting Pot: Clarke’s Market Fit

“Any sufficiently extreme product market fit is indistinguishable from obsession.”

Think about the hundreds of people who stand in line for new Supreme and Apple drops. Think about the line length at a Starbucks on a college campus.

Some would call buyers obsessed or even addicted. Others would say that there is a very strong product market fit.

If you enjoyed this piece, I’ve written previous articles about mental frameworks like Play Iterated Games, Expected Value of Real Decisions, and Circles of Competence, Mediocrity, and Ignorance.

If you didn’t enjoy this piece, you can find me on social media and tell me why.

Twitter: @iamjasonlevin