By era
Contemporary
24 entries
Antifragility
Beyond resilience lies a third state: things that do not merely survive disorder but grow stronger from it, and can be built on purpose.
8 min
Mental modelBlue Ocean Strategy
Stop fighting rivals in a crowded market; create uncontested market space where competition does not yet exist, by delivering differentiation and low cost at once.
8 min
Mental modelEffectuation
The decision logic expert entrepreneurs actually use: start from the means you already have, cap your downside at what you can afford to lose, and build the goal with whoever commits, rather than predicting a future and chasing it.
7 min
IdeologyIlliberal Democracy
A system that keeps the vote but strips out the limits: elections continue while the free press, the courts, minority rights, and the rule of law are hollowed from within.
11 min
ConceptIndividualism and Collectivism
The most-studied axis in cross-cultural psychology, on which cultures range from prizing the self-contained individual to prizing the person embedded in a group.
10 min
Mental modelJobs to Be Done
Customers do not buy products, they hire them to make progress on a job that arises in a specific circumstance.
7 min
IdeologyModern Monetary Theory
A government that issues its own currency can never run out of it, so the real limit on public spending is inflation and idle resources, not the risk of going broke.
11 min
IdeologyNational Conservatism
A contemporary right that fuses cultural traditionalism with national sovereignty, set against globalism and rule by experts.
11 min
ConceptNudge
Because how choices are arranged always tilts them one way, arrange the defaults and framing to help people while leaving them free to opt out.
9 min
Mental modelPirate Metrics (AARRR)
The customer lifecycle broken into five measurable stages, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue, so you fix the one leaking stage instead of chasing a flattering total.
7 min
ConceptProduct-Market Fit
The point at which a product satisfies a strong market so well that demand pulls it out of the company faster than the company can supply it.
8 min
ConceptResponsibility to Protect
The doctrine that sovereignty carries a duty to protect a population from atrocity, and that when a state fails, that duty passes to the world.
8 min
Mental modelThe Black Swan
A rare, unpredictable, high-consequence event that we insist, only afterward, we should have seen coming.
8 min
Mental modelThe Flywheel
Momentum is built turn by turn: no single push transforms anything, but consistent effort in one direction compounds into force that becomes nearly unstoppable.
8 min
Mental modelThe Globalization Trilemma
Deep economic integration, the nation-state, and democracy cannot all hold at once: pick any two and you must give up the third.
9 min
Mental modelThe Lean Startup
Treat a startup as an experiment engine whose real product is validated learning, and test cheap falsifiable hypotheses before you scale.
7 min
Mental modelThe Long Tail
When shelf space is unlimited, the many niche products can collectively rival the few hits.
8 min
ConceptThe Replication Crisis
The discovery that a large share of landmark psychology findings could not be reproduced, traced to small samples, flexible statistics, and a publishing system that rewards novelty over truth.
9 min
Mental modelThe Rubber Band Model
A hard decision about whether to leave is a rubber band stretched between the bonds that hold you and the pull of something new; name both before you decide.
6 min
ConceptThe Thucydides Trap
The idea that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the resulting structural stress often ends in war.
9 min
Mental modelThe Transtheoretical Model
A map of behavior change as a sequence of five stages, from not intending to change to sustaining a change, with different help suited to each.
9 min
ConceptThe Venture Capital Power Law
Venture returns are so skewed that a fund's single best investment usually returns more than all the others combined, so the winning strategy is to maximize exposure to extreme upside, not to avoid loss.
9 min
ConceptThe WEIRD-Sample Critique
The finding that most published psychology describes people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, a narrow and often unrepresentative slice of the species mistaken for a universal baseline.
9 min
ConceptWisdom and Successful Aging
What psychology actually finds when it measures wisdom and studies who ages well: some abilities decline, others hold or grow, and wisdom is rarer and less age-bound than the folk picture assumes.
10 min