How mental models can help you achieve your goals

Put simply, a?mental model?is how a person thinks something should work. In design, this generally applies to what we call design patterns — the way certain features generally work, or the way certain components generally behave.

While we don’t want to just copy everybody else when we design, we also don’t want to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.

For instance, if you’re designing a “success” button, you probably wouldn’t make it red. Making this button red would go against the common mental model of red being associated with error messages. Instead, if you wanted your design to be intuitive, you would accompany the success message with some sort of green indicator.

In life, I apply this idea of not ‘reinventing the wheel’ to goal achievement. While there’s a lot I want to do in this life, I recognize that there are many talented people who have already done what I want to do.

While I don’t want to just copy someone I admire’s career path verbatim (my life, context etc are different than theirs after all), I do think identifying common “patterns” between the people I admire has helped me massively in setting myself up for success.

To do this, I like to look at the LinkedIn profiles of people I admire and identify common themes. What did they study? What roles did they have? What activities do they engage in outside their day job? Do any of these resonate?

Through identifying these patterns, I’ve been able to get greater traction than I ever could have imagined.

This week…

I encourage you to LinkedIn stalk 5–8 people you admire. What common traits do they have? How can you adopt these traits to achieve similar outcomes?