The single most valuable skill you can develop:

Thinking with Mental Models.

18 years of school destroyed our critical thinking & decision-making.

I've collected 12 of the most powerful mental models: 🧵
Second-Order Thinking

Most people only consider immediate effects.

Real strategists think 2-3 steps ahead.

When you make decisions, always ask: "What are the second and third-order consequences?"

A "cognitive bias" is a systematic error in thinking that ruins decision-making.

80% are useless—20% will change your life.

11 most powerful cognitive biases I've found: 🧵 1. Parkinson's Law:

Work expands to fill the time given.

When we have more time, we tend to procrastinate and become inefficient.

A good reminder to track your tasks duration and energy level.

Everyone talks about chess legends like:

Magnus Carlsen. Hikaru Nakamura. Garry Kasparov

But one man stands heads and shoulders above all.

Despite 11 World Championships, this prodigy died alone and was forgotten at 64. Here's his story: Bobby Fischer's was THE true chess prodigy:

• Won his first tournament at 9
• Became the youngest US Junior Chess Champion at 13
• Played the "Game of the Century" against IM Donald Byrne at 13

But that's not what makes him special...

In 1985, Stephen Hawking caught pneumonia in Switzerland.

The doctors gave his wife 2 options:
1. Let them end his life
2. Watch him die

So she chose option 3. Here's what she did instead: 🧵 At CERN in Switzerland, Hawking's condition deteriorated rapidly.

His ALS-weakened lungs couldn't fight the pneumonia. Every breath was a battle.

The ventilator kept him alive, but doctors said it was just prolonging the inevitable...

Leonardo da Vinci was the most creative person in history.

He left us over 7000 pages of sketches and notes that, 500 years later, historians yet to decode.

6 times Da Vinci correctly predicted and invented the future: 🧵
1/ Da Vinci's anatomical discoveries...

• First to describe the heart as a 4-chambered muscle
• Recognized coronary artery disease 150 years before physicians

He once dissected 30+ cadavers to understand anatomy:

This is Marie Curie.

• pioneer of radioactivity
• first woman to win a Nobel Prize
• first person to win Nobel Prizes in 2 fields

Sadly, her legacy was a heartbreaking tragedy. Here's How the Genius of Marie Curie Killed Her: (thread)🧵
In 1927, Marie Curie was the ONLY woman among 29 top physicists at the prestigious Solvay Conference.

On top of the world, but the tragic-devil was already waiting for her...

The man who cheated death:

Seneca.

His letters survived 2,000 years and now warn us of the lessons that the West has forgotten.

The Roman emperors tried to destroy them. But these 9 teachings are truly timeless... 🧵 Seneca was born in the same year as Christ & became Rome's greatest Stoic thinker.

He faced banishment, and attempted murder, and was ultimately ordered to commit suicide by Emperor Nero.

Let's understand Seneca's 9 not-so-discussed philosophy...

Isaac Newton was the most dangerous genius ever alive.

The Royal Society hid his papers and journals for 200+ years.

I've collected 5 of his most daring experiments.

Here's what they were hiding: 🧵 Born in 1642 to a poor farming family in England, Newton started life as a tiny premature baby.

• His father died before his birth.

• His mother abandoned him at age 3 to marry another man.

This upbringing may explain Newton later risked his life for knowledge & truth...

The most genius life-saving device of WWII wasn't a weapon, med or vehicle.

It was a metal box floating along the English Channel.

Here's how these "sea hotels" changed combat survival forever: 🧵 WWII made the English Channel deadly for pilots.

80% of airmen died when shot down over water.

Only 50% died over land.

The Germans created something ingenious to help their men survive. But what was it?

The Titanic sank with America's wealthiest men onboard.

J.P. Morgan, who owned the ship, mysteriously cancelled his ticket days before.

Some call it luck. Others call it an assassination.

Here's the conspiracy that haunted the most famous shipwreck in history: 🧵 J.P. Morgan's International Mercantile Marine Company owned the White Star Line.

• Built at a cost of $7.5 million
• 882.5 feet long, 92.5 feet wide
• Marketed as "unsinkable"
• Set sail April 10, 1912

The passenger list included America's elite like:

Osama bin Laden disappeared completely after 9/11.

No phone calls. No emails. No digital footprint.

While hiding from the CIA's most sophisticated surveillance system ever built, he made just one mistake.... (thread) 🧵
Just 4 days before the 2004 presidential election, bin Laden appeared in a new video claiming responsibility for 9/11 more directly than ever before.

It was a painful reminder that the most wanted man on Earth was still free—and feeling safe enough to taunt America.

The Soviets put the first woman in space in 1963.

The U.S? 20 years LATER.

NASA had 13 elite female astronauts ready before the USSR—some outscored the best astronaut, John Glenn...

But then they mysteriously disappeared... (thread)🧵
In 1959, while NASA was training its first all-male Mercury 7 astronauts, Dr. William Lovelace was running their physical testing.

He wondered: could women handle spaceflight?

This is Jose Silva.

In the 1960s, he ran an experiment to hypnotize his 10 kids with radio frequency.

The result?

He unlocked the key to peak genius human consciousness.

Here's his story and how you can hack your mind: In the 1960s, Jose Silva ran experiments on his 10 kids using hypnosis and brainwave tech.

The results were mind-blowing:

• Heightened intuition
• Improved school grades
• His daughter Isabel could even predict the future

This became the foundation of the Silva Method.

70 years ago, a woman discovered nuclear fission.

But her male colleague stole her work and won the Nobel Prize.

She fled Nazi Germany empty handed and died without a word.

Here's how the biggest theft in science buried Lise Meitner's name in history: 🧵
Born in Vienna in 1878, Lise Meitner fought to enter a field that actively excluded women.

Universities across Europe severely limited female students, especially in physics...

This woman was the "forgotten genius" who made one of the greatest discoveries

Her discoveries of the pulsars influenced Einstein and Hawking.

Yet being a female lost her the Nobel Prize.

Here's how the biggest theft in science buried Jocelyn Bell's name in history: 🧵
In 1967, 24-year-old PhD student Jocelyn Bell spotted an unusual signal in her radio telescope data.

It pulsed every 1.3337 seconds with perfect precision.

Her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, thought it was just radio interference.

But Bell's gut was telling her something else...

You've been lied to.

Historians say ancient civilizations were primitive in caves.

But this 2,000-year-old computer was an invention that no 21st-century engineer can explain.

Welcome to the Antikythera Mechanism: 🧵 In 1901, sponge divers discovered an ancient Roman shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera.

They found something unusual among the statues, pottery, and jewelry: a mysterious lump of corroded bronze...

This is Rita Levi-Montalcini

• Lived to 103...
• Won the Nobel Prize at 77
• Published 171 scientific papers

In 1943, the Nazis bombed her lab, but what she achieved next changed science forever.

Here is her full story: 🧵 Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in 1909 in Turin, Italy.

Her father discouraged women from higher education.

But Rita had no interest in being a housewife.

And had a crazy dream...

At 16, she was forced to become Queen of England.

In just 9 days, she lost her crown.
her freedom.
her life.

This is the forgotten rise and fall of Lady Jane Grey: (THREAD)🧵
Born into Tudor England's religious chaos, was extraordinary:

• Mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
• Fluent in French and Italian
• Known for her brilliant mind
• Deeply devoted to Protestant faith

Unlike most noble ladies, she wasn't your typical girl...

This man solved one of the hardest puzzles of the century.

Then rejected his $1,000,000 prize and vanished into Soviet Russia.

Everyone thought he was crazy.

Here's the forgotten story of the craziest genius mathematician everyone should know about: 🧵 Born in 1966 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Grigori Perelman won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad at 16.

With a perfect score, his genius granted him a bypass of Soviet antisemitism, allowing him to study at the top university in Leningrad.

In 1932, the US govt. began secretly watching black men die of a curable disease.

For 40 years:
• They stayed quiet
• Studied them like lab rats.
• Withheld cure (found in 1947)

This is one of America's most disturbing experiments. Welcome to Tuskegee Experiment:🧵
In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service recruited 600 African American men in Macon County, Alabama for a study they called "bad blood."

399 had latent syphilis. 201 were healthy controls...

This man:

• Fooled the US Navy
• Impersonated 47 different people.
• Performed REAL surgeries without a medical degree,

His deceptions made him one of human history's most fascinating con men.

But most people never understood his motivation...🧵 Born in 1921 in Massachusetts, Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. grew up in wealth.

Then, the Great Depression hit...