A Week of Thinking Better
Goal
Sharpen the way you think, decide and learn in seven days: using mental models, recognizing your biases, deciding with judgment, learning with the techniques that work and keeping your brain active. It combines ideas on mental models, decision-making, learning and cognitive reserve. One short micro-habit a day.
Day 1 — Second-order thinking
Micro-habit: Faced with a decision or action today, don't stop at the first consequence: ask yourself "and after that, what happens?".
Duration: 2 minutes.
Why it works: Many decisions look good in their immediate effect and bad in the ones that follow. Thinking at the second order sets you apart from people who only see the first step.
Tip: Gaining a mental model means changing lens to see what you couldn't see before.
Day 2 — Invert the problem
Micro-habit: For something you want to achieve, turn it around: ask how you would reliably ruin it, and then avoid that.
Duration: 3 minutes.
Why it works: Sometimes it's easier to identify the mistakes to avoid than the perfect path. For a good life, start by not doing what guarantees a bad one.
Tip: Inversion is one of the most useful and least used mental models.
Day 3 — Widen your options
Micro-habit: When a decision is framed as "do it or don't", ask yourself: "what else could I do?".
Duration: 2 minutes.
Why it works: Most bad decisions come from binary framing. There are almost always more than two paths.
Tip: Watch out for confirmation bias: look for arguments against your preferred option too.
Day 4 — The pre-mortem
Micro-habit: Before an important decision, imagine you already made it and it went badly: why did it fail? Write the reasons down.
Duration: 5 minutes.
Why it works: Anticipating the causes of failure before deciding reveals risks that enthusiasm hides.
Tip: Don't decide when tired or heated: fatigue and emotion worsen judgment.
Day 5 — Retrieve, don't reread
Micro-habit: Choose something you want to learn and, after reading it, close the material and try to recall it or answer questions on it.
Duration: 5 minutes.
Why it works: Pulling information out of memory fixes it far better than rereading. Learning that feels easy is usually shallow.
Tip: Desirable difficulty — a bit of struggle — is exactly what consolidates.
Day 6 — Explain it in your own words
Micro-habit: Take something you learned this week and explain it in your own words, out loud or in writing, as if you were teaching someone.
Duration: 4 minutes.
Why it works: If you can explain it clearly, you understood it; if not, not yet. Teaching is the best test of comprehension.
Tip: Space your reviews over time too; spacing beats cramming by a wide margin.
Day 7 — Mental challenge
Micro-habit: Spend some time on a new mental challenge that genuinely stretches you (a language, a problem, a difficult read) and break one of the day's routines.
Duration: 15 minutes.
Why it works: Continually learning new things builds cognitive reserve: it keeps the brain flexible and protects your sharpness over the years.
Tip: The brain is plastic at any age; it strengthens with use like a muscle.
Closing reflection
Write one line: "This week I thought better when ___". Thinking well isn't a matter of raw intelligence, but of using good tools: looking at the second order, inverting the problem, widening your options, deciding with a cool head and learning properly. Keep sharpening those tools; they're the most durable advantage there is.