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Season: Worldly Wisdom
Chapter: The Latticework
Analogy
The latticework is like a closet.
Without hangers, you can’t hang any clothes, and your closet can’t serve its purpose.
But, with hangers, you can become more organized and effective, making the most of the space in your closet. The more hangers you have, the more clothes you can hang. However, it isn’t enough to just have hangers because your closet can quickly become messy and disorganized, making it hard to find anything.
Ideas which you deeply understand represent the hangers, and these allow you to neatly “hang” other ideas on – over time helping you form mental models. However, while physical closets can quickly become full and disorganized, if you approach your learning process correctly, it is impossible to overstuff your mind. In fact, the more ideas you have in your head, the more hooks you have to hang ideas on. Ideas beget ideas and learning begets learning, and this is how and why people can experience exponential learning.
Visual
Action
A latticework is traditionally used in home improvement projects to create shade, decorate fences, support plants, and more. It creates a stable structure as each point connects and reinforces every other point. Using this metaphor for our own purposes, we can use a latticework structure to organize and reinforce ideas and mental models.
If successful in forming this mental structure, you’ll be able to attach new knowledge to previous knowledge, allowing you to more easily learn new concepts. Rather than having information floating around aimlessly in our heads, we’ll have a way to organize silos of information into interconnected webs of understanding. This process can also expose our blind spots because we’ll have a better grasp of where our gaps in understanding are, making it easier to actively search out and fill these voids (Circle of Competence).
In addition, since the solutions to major problems often exist at the crossroads of disciplines, having a diverse set of mental models to draw on can increase the likelihood of approaching a problem productively and efficiently, leading to optimal outcomes.