Disclaimers: IANAN^[1] and explicit

I believe that your mental models affect the way that you interact with the world. The way you interact with the world manifests in your actions. It goes like this.

mental models → perception → reactions → actions

This is not “visualize your successes.” This is more like “the way you see the world is how you will interact with it.” There is at least one study that seems to support that your mental model affects the way you view reality.^[2]

To get the best out of your mental models, you have to think about them. You have to think about them a lot. Otherwise, your mental models will be formed by what Daniel Quinn calls Mother Culture, our ubiquitous nurturer. For most people, thinking about thinking is an unusual activity.

Building a mental model takes discipline. All disciplined actions take effort. Let’s be honest: effort is tiring. I am lazy as fuck. For example, the pandemic gave me an excuse to not go to the gym. And, now, I’m waaaay past my ideal weight. Why haven’t I “fixed” this? Because my self-image mental model is not that strong. When I look at myself in the mirror, I’m not that bothered by the Dadbod.

I will admit that I think having any kind of discipline demands some amount of obsession. I’m one of those people that likes to throw myself into “a thing”. There’s some obsession behind that behavior. Sometimes (most of the time), I get bored with whatever I’m doing, then I extricate myself from whatever I’m doing. I tend to be a Jack of All Trades, Master of One.

There’s a recursive nature to this problem: since I have a mental model that frames my perceptions, I perhaps can only see it this way unless I build a different mental model. Who knows?

This rest of this is an anecdote-driven post. The anecdotes are mine. Names other than mine have been changed to protect people’s identities. The anecdotes are in chronological order as they happened in my life.

Everything is Go

I like to read. In 1990, I picked up the first two books of the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove. They’re okay, I guess, with some good world building. The books suffered from a trend at the time in science fiction, the trend of a gazillion points of view in the book. There were over 1,200 pages between the two books, so there were plenty of pages that you could fill up with like nineteen “main” characters.

One of the characters of the novels is the game Go.^[3] All of the major characters play it. Through the way they play, we learn about how they view the world. I really like playing strategy board games and had grown somewhat bored with chess. I ran off to the local game store (board games, not video games) and bought the cheapest Go set I could.^[4]

My friend JoJo^[5] and I went to a coffee shop, got some drinks, sat outside (it was a lovely Bay Area spring), read the rules (of which there are only nine), and played a game. It was boring. JoJo and I couldn’t reconcile the gameplay with what I’d read about the fierce and subtle strategy described in the Wingrove’s books. We discussed the possibilities that we just didn’t properly understand the game.

I went to my local independent book store and spent way too much money on the Kiseido Publishing “Mastering the Basics” series.^[6] When they arrived two weeks later,^[7] I read them and practiced them. The convinced JoJo to play another game with me. My new knowledge allowed me to win the three games we played. By a lot.

JoJo borrowed the books and learned. Our games started taking longer and longer to play. At one point, one of our games lasted just over five hours because we were playing well. I eventually joined a Go club and played many nights per week.

I found Go to be the funnest thing in my life. I really liked it. I liked it so much, it’s all I thought about. Sitting in class, I’d be working on different Go problems. Sitting at coffee shops, I’d play games against myself. Sitting with my girlfriend, I’d tell her all about my thoughts about Go.

That’s a little bit of an obsession. Like young love. Go was all I thought about. I really only wanted to play Go.

My car at the time was a white car. One day while driving, I was surrounded by white and black cars. All of a sudden, I was not driving in traffic. Instead, my car was a white stone on a Go board surrounded by other stones. I almost rear-ended the car in front of me at a traffic light because I was playing a game of Go in my head with the cars as the playing pieces.

Shit.

I had worked so hard to build a mental model to play Go, it started imposing itself into situations where I was not playing Go. My Go mental model changed had changed the way that I experienced reality.

Changing my current reality filters

I’ve spent 25 years as a software developer/architect/executive.^[8] I built some really good mental models about how software should be shaped. I’ve spent eight years thinking about how to teach software development to audiences of varied technical experience. My strongest mental models are now

• Software architecture and implementation
• Agile software development practices
• Technical writing for education

When I write “strongest mental models,” I mean that those are the ones that dominate my reality. When I approach problems in my world (small or large), usually one of those three mental models is the primary way that I approach the problems.

I’m now trying to build a new mental model: story telling. I’ve spent nearly eight months on building this. I’ve read a bunch of books. I went to a convention. I’ve hired a writing coach.^[9] I am going to a writer’s retreat in September. I’ve listened to nearly 300 episodes of Scriptnotes, not because I’m writing scripts, but because they talk story. I’ve immersed myself in the craft.

I have tried to build a mental model that perceives the world through the structure of story.

Interestingly, portions of my current mental models are applicable to writing:

• The part of the mental model for software architecture, putting together and keeping track of lots of disparate components, that’s really helpful when trying to put together the plot of a story.
• The part of the mental model for Agile software development prompts me to work on the most complex parts first, get a minimum viable product, and use feedback as a way to improve (not treat it as a personal attack).

The mental model I didn’t have is the most important part of story, the part that tracks the evolution of the mental models of the characters.

Last week, I got an idea for a plot. I put it in my list of book ideas. Two days ago, I was driving home from a viewing of Longlegs and, during the mundanity of the drive, I figured out the main character’s arc. I used speech-to-text to translate my idea onto my phone.^[10] Yesterday, I sat down and banged out the character journey and the spine of the story. This is the first time it actually happened for me! The story telling mental model is finally active.

Of course, I need to actually write the story. But, the entire story is in my head and I’ve got nearly 2,000 words in the design document. I feel that I am set up for success on it.

I’m going to spend this week’s free time applying this nascent mental model to the design of my novel. I’m going to get some feedback on the short story to make sure the design is strong. Then, I’ll either publish it on this Web site, or submit it for publication in one of the many publications out there.