Nova's PicksUpgrade Your Thinking: The Mental Models Program
A growth plan in upgrading the quality of your thinking — from understanding cognitive biases, to building cross-domain mental models, to developing the kind of judgment that consistently produces better decisions and better ideas.
1. Module 1 · Know How Your Mind Betrays You
The prerequisite for thinking better is understanding how thinking goes wrong.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Kahneman's masterwork on System 1 and System 2 — the foundational text for anyone who wants to understand the machinery of human judgment.
The Intelligence Trap
David Robson's disturbing research on why smart people make stupid mistakes.
Predictably Irrational
Dan Ariely's behavioral economics catalog: the invisible, irrational forces driving our decisions.
2. Module 2 · Think in Systems, Models & Probabilities
Build the specific thinking tools used by the world's best forecasters, investors, and strategists.
Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows's classic on systems thinking — how feedback loops, delays, and emergent behavior explain phenomena from traffic jams to stock markets to ecosystems.
Thinking in Bets
Annie Duke's probabilistic decision framework: separate decision quality from outcome quality.
Superforecasting
Philip Tetlock's research on what separates expert forecasters from everyone else.
3. Module 3 · Synthesize & Generate Original Ideas
The highest level of thinking: connecting ideas across disciplines, developing genuine originality, and building the intellectual range that produces breakthrough insight.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
David Epstein's counter-intuitive argument that cross-domain breadth, not deep specialization, is what enables the most creative and adaptive thinking.
Freakonomics
Levitt and Dubner's model for thinking about incentives and hidden causes.
Black Box Thinking
Matthew Syed's study of industries that learn from failure versus those that don't.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Naval's closing synthesis: specific knowledge, mental models for wealth and happiness, and the integration of philosophy, science, and practice into a coherent way of being.