Mental models for creative professionals

A library for people who make things.

Every creative discipline teaches craft. None of them teach thinking. One model a week closes that gap: a real person, a concrete moment, the rule, and the first move for tomorrow. Free.

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Latest model · 8 min read Intermediate

MAYA Principle

Raymond Loewy sat in a NASA conference room in Washington on October 14, 1969, and listened to an engineer explain why the astronauts would never look out a window. He was seventy-five years old. He had drawn the Lucky

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Start with these three.

Three Beginner models, about half an hour in total. Each one changes a decision you will make this week.

1

First Principles Thinking

Wilbur Wright stood in a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, twisting a cardboard box. 5 min read
2

Eisenhower Matrix

Charles Dickens sat at his desk in Devonshire Terrace on an October evening in 1843, reading sales figures for a novel that was bleeding readers. 7 min read
3

Four Stages of Creativity

Henri Poincaré stepped onto an omnibus at Coutances in 1880. 7 min read
The library

Recent entries

The Hammer and the Nail

Alfred Hitchcock set Robert Bloch’s Psycho on a Paramount executive’s desk in the summer of 1959.

Beginner 8 min read

Form-Function Attribution Bias

Doug Evans spent 1,200 days in San Francisco building a juicer.

Intermediate 9 min read

Redundancy

Oren Jacob watched the files vanish. He stood in Larry Cutler’s office at Pixar’s Richmond, California campus in 1998, staring at a directory for the character Woody on his screen.

BeginnerMembers 7 min read

Predator-Prey Dynamics

Umberto D’Ancona spread Adriatic Sea catch records across his desk at the University of Rome.

AdvancedMembers 7 min read

Infinite Game

Paul Cézanne was sixty-seven when a thunderstorm caught him painting Mont Sainte-Victoire.

IntermediateMembers 8 min read

Satisficing

Isaac Asimov sat at his electric typewriter by seven-thirty each morning, a backup machine in the closet for the day the first one died.

Beginner 6 min read
All models, A to Z
The Big Book of Mental Models
The book

165 thinking frameworks for creatives.

The cognitive architecture behind every creative career that works. 800+ pages of decision-making tools adapted for artists, writers, designers, and musicians.

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