(Excerpt from The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish)
Peter Bevelin, put it best: “I don’t want to be a great problem solver. I want to avoid problems—prevent them from happening and doing it right from the beginning.”
… Understanding reality is the name of the game. Understanding not only helps us decide which actions to take but helps us remove or avoid actions that have a big downside that we would otherwise not be aware of. Not only do we understand the immediate problem with more accuracy, but we can begin to see the second-, third-, and higher-order consequences. This understanding helps us eliminate avoidable errors. Sometimes making good decisions boils down to avoiding bad ones.