"How to Make the Right Choice: You Need to Know These Two Pieces of Information"

This article is Lu Canwei's 36th original piece.

Click on the blue 【Lu Canwei】 above to follow; remember to add a ⭐️ star mark~

Today I saw that a friend's daily update plan has already surpassed the halfway mark. Those who can persist in daily updates for 50 days are truly impressive. Everyone can follow him, 【Mr. Er Yu】.

Originally, this was supposed to be published before 12 o'clock today, but it ended up being posted only now. So today, let's talk about the topic of 【Choice】.

Our lives are always about choices.

No matter who you are, you are constantly making choices. Whether it's as small as deciding whether to sleep in or as significant as choosing who to spend the rest of your life with, we are always making various choices. So why is it called choice and not decision?

Cognitive psychology divides decision-making into six stages:

As you can see, choice is more of a step within the decision-making process, but often we may or may not have gone through the preceding stages before making a choice.

Take the act of getting up in the morning as an example. How many people actually think about what would happen if they don't wake up early, then gather information, weigh the pros and cons of waking up early versus not waking up early, and finally choose a plan to implement? I think no one does that. If you enter deep thought, then the question of whether to get up or not becomes irrelevant.

In making choices, we usually select what we currently believe to be the best option available to us. When we give up other options, those options become our opportunity costs.

However, in most cases, the opportunity cost must be the project with the highest return among the opportunities we forgo.

So how do I know which is the opportunity cost? To be honest, I don't know either. If you do, please leave a comment to let me know.

In previous articles, I wrote about how we train ourselves to make instant decisions. Here, I will discuss how we provide foundational knowledge for our instant decisions.

Multidisciplinary Thinking Models

I believe everyone has seen the interview video of Charlie Munger that I posted a couple of days ago. The multidisciplinary thinking model is a method of thinking that Munger frequently mentions as influencing his life, learning, and decision-making. He advocates for continuously learning knowledge from different disciplines to form a composite framework of thinking models.

Let's look at Charlie Munger's explanation of the "multidisciplinary thinking model":

For example, here are some core models from various disciplines:

The law of entropy increase in thermodynamics, economies of scale, marginal effects, sunk costs, opportunity costs in economics, cognitive biases, mental models, anchoring effects, attribution errors in psychology, and so on.

When you start to engage with different disciplines, you will find that many principles are actually interconnected. There are already too many giants in this world who have helped you establish various models; you just need to learn from them. Only by standing on the shoulders of giants can we see further.

To give a personal example, I am a full-stack developer, very familiar with mobile, front-end, and back-end development. Therefore, my considerations are not limited to just one segment when thinking about solutions, but rather I consider the optimal solution from a holistic perspective.

If you understand products as a technical person, your perspective on problems will be completely different. You will no longer be confined to perfect technical solutions; you might propose some seamless transition solutions for users, even if it involves some redundant development. For products like mini-programs, if the product team does not understand technology, such products would never come into existence.

Here's another example: in the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow," there is a case about an education entrepreneur whose company grew rapidly, securing Series B funding in just a few years. When the author asked him why the project developed so quickly, he said, "In this field, one important reason for rapid development is that we learned a lot from the competitive sports industry."

Upon hearing this, I was puzzled; these two things seem unrelated. The most common joke we hear is, "Your math is taught by the PE teacher," which seems to follow a similar logic.

Later, I continued reading, and he mentioned: "The commonality between competitive sports and education is that both are solving a problem: how to use strategies to help a person change their behavior more quickly and improve their abilities faster." Therefore, they borrowed techniques and methods from competitive sports to improve practices in education, transferring the experiences and methods developed in mature industries to the education sector.

Often, new problems in one field may be old problems that have been researched and analyzed for a long time in another field. This is somewhat akin to what we call "Internet Plus," where solutions from more developed fields are applied to solve problems in less developed fields.

For example, copying mature foreign models from the internet ten years ago to today's domestic mature models going overseas essentially reflects the same thinking model.

Feynman Learning Method

Now that we've talked about thinking models, how do we learn all these things?

Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, was an American Jew, a theoretical physicist, one of the founders of quantum electrodynamics, and the father of nanotechnology. He received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics. He is considered the wisest theoretical physicist after Einstein and the first person to propose the concept of nanotechnology.

But today, I mainly want to discuss the learning method he created.

The Feynman Learning Method can be simplified into four words: Concept, Teach, Review, Simplify.

To put it plainly, you take what you've learned and explain it in the simplest language to a child. If you can't teach it, then you need to rethink and simplify your language, repeating the above actions. Once you can teach it well, you will have learned it yourself.

Here's a little tip: when we learn something, we can use examples. For instance, if I learn a certain concept, I might come across an example, and these examples are limited.

For example, 1+1=2, 1+2=3. If these are the only situations we face, then I just need to memorize these examples.

However, when we explain, the other person's knowledge and information may differ from ours, so you are facing new situations that your previous examples no longer apply to. Therefore, you need to come up with new examples or new perspectives.

When you can explain and generate new examples, it also validates your learning, and you will have learned.

Regarding learning, I strongly recommend everyone to search for "Learning Perspectives" on Bilibili. This is probably the second time I've recommended this video series. The creator is truly impressive, explaining the concept of learning from a very foundational perspective.

If you want to learn about different disciplines' thinking models, feel free to reply with "Thinking Models" to receive various thinking models from different disciplines.

Recommendations:

The Four Stages of Cognition: Which Stage Are You In?

Did you know? Instant decision-making can be trained.

A little motivational boost.

Why do I still feel tired even after sleeping for 8 hours every day?

Breaking the 5,000-person limit? Let's talk about WeChat 8.0.

What does it mean to have "value"?

Scan to follow 【Lu Canwei】, and send "Self-Media Materials" in the background to receive two free benefits:

1. A self-media tool kit (valued at 1999 yuan).

2. An electronic version of the "2020 Wealth Calendar," containing 365 money-making tips.

Appreciation has been canceled; "Looking" is the strongest support ↘