The Great Mental Models, Volume 3

Systems and Mathematics

By: Shane Parrish, Rhiannon Beaubien, Rosie Leizrowice

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

From the New York Times bestselling author of Clear Thinking and Farnam Street founder, Shane Parrish.

The third book in the timeless Great Mental Models series.

Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields.

Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back.

Volume 3 of The Great Mental Models series focuses on systems and mathematics, simplifying more than twenty-four key concepts from these technical fields into easy-to-understand terms. It provides insights into the unseen mechanisms that influence our environment and teaches you how to apply these principles to benefit your life.

Some of the mental models covered in this book include:

• Margin of Safety: Engineers design for extremes, not averages. To create a robust system, ensure a meaningful gap between what the system is capable of handling and what it is required to handle.

• Compounding: The most powerful force in the universe can work in domains other than money.
• The law of diminishing returns: Inputs to a system lead to more output, up until a point where each further unit of input will lead to a decreasing amount of output.
• Regression to the mean: Above- or below- average performance tends to correct towards the average over the long term.

The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

Critic reviews

“I’m really glad this exists in the world and I can see that I will be recommending it often.”
— Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, founder and CEO of Automattic


“If you’ve read Charlie Munger’s Almanack this is the book you deeply crave in its wake. … Learn the big ideas from the big disciplines and you’ll be able to twist and turn problems in interesting ways at unprecedented speeds. … You owe yourself this book.”
— Simon Eskildsen


“This is what non-fiction books should aspire to be like. Informative, concise, universal, practical, visual, sharing stories and examples for context. Definitely, a must-read if you’re into universal multi-disciplinary thinking.”
— Carl Rannaberg


“I can truly say it is one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure of getting lost in. I loved the book and the challenges to conventional wisdom and thinking it presents.”
— Rod Berryman


“Want to learn? Read This! This should be a standard text for high school and university students.”
— Code Cubitt

Introduced me to new models and reinforced some I know

Parish’s book is more like a checklist of models with a brief introduction. It is a starting point for a long lifelong exploration of useful mental models, and in this these are excellent. I read through quite rapidly, but will spend a great deal of time, as suggested in the book, exploring each model at length. However, this checklist takes years off of this exploration.

My favorite so far, maybe beacuse I'm a engineer

I've been reading the series and this is my favorite so far i need to read the last one but this one is so refreshing but maybe this is because I'm a engineer and I love the relation that are made with physics and mathematics in real life situations.

Shane Parrish is the best

I get such rich insights from everything he writes. Love this book. It’s immediately very applicable.

This book will enhance your universal applied knowledge

There are few things more exciting than finding that rare book that fits perfectly into your custom body of knowledge. This is one of those books that's going to make you better at everything!

U dropped the ball bro, narration is brutal

It feels like a black and white tv show from the 40s, I would have rather some AI narrated this.