Richard Feynman's Mental Models

The Feynman technique for learning is devastatingly simple: choose a concept, explain it as if teaching a 12-year-old, identify gaps in your explanation, and go back to source material to fill them.

Feynman believed that if you can't explain something simply, you don't really understand it. Mental models are simplified representations of reality that allow us to reason about complex systems.

The key is to collect mental models from different disciplines. The more models you have, the better equipped you are to understand new problems from multiple angles.