#211 Josh Kaufman – Episode Notes

Josh Kaufman Key Takeaways

Josh was inspired to research and write the first version of The Personal MBA when he was leaving college feeling unsatisfied with his business education. He became fascinated with mental models after stumbling across Charlie Munger in his research.

“Having these ideas in your head makes it much easier to figure out what you should do, the order in which you should do it, and figure out all the things you should spend your time on versus all of the things that you can safely ignore”

Josh describes a mental model as a mental simulation, which he says is one of the most unique aspects that make us human and guide our decision making.

“The more mental models you have in a wide variety of areas, the more situations you can imagine or simulate, even things that you haven’t experienced before”

After revisiting The Personal MBA ten years later, Josh has updated the manuscript with new references, examples, and studies.

“The goal of the book overall, is that by the time that you’re done, you should have a collection of accurate, useful, simple, clear ideas about all of these important aspects of modern business practice”

4:05 Josh’s Peaked Interest for Cognitive Tools and Mental Models

Josh’s original interest in business began as he was leaving college and starting his career. As he left college, he felt unsatisfied.

“I had the very distinct experience of going through this entire program and realizing that never once was there an attempt to define what business are and how they work at a fundamental level”

Josh began reading and researching and stumbled across Charlie Munger and his concept of “business mental levels”.

Josh was looking for a collection of all the important mental models of business at large, and he couldn’t find it. This inspired him to create the collection he was looking for while also working his corporate job.

“I was going to do my own reading and research and put together this compendium of everything you need to know about business”

8:39 Definition of a Mental Model

Josh likes to think about it like mental models are for mental simulation

“To me, a cognitive tool or a mental model is a mental representation of how something in the world works”

Josh uses the example of jumping into a volcano. We all can imagine what that would feel like and we know that it is not a good idea, even without having experienced it before.

“Our brains have this wonderful capability called mental simulation, we don’t have to do things or experience things in the real world to figure out whether or not they’re a good idea”

Josh explains how our minds take pieces or relationships that we already have stored in our memory and piece together all the relevant concepts and relationships to figure out in an imaginary sense what we expect to happen when we take some specific action.

“The more mental models you have in a wide variety of areas, the more situations you can imagine or simulate, even things that you haven’t experienced before”

In a business context, what we’re trying to do is collect these mental models of what a business is, what businesses do, how they work

11:56 Business is Universal

Josh describes business as a universal tool that is useful regardless of who you are and what your work is.

“It’s amazing how many ideas that nominally apply to business have excellent cross over potential when you’re looking into personal decisions”

13:41 Josh’s Journey to Business

Josh describes himself as having not always been interested in business, but having a constant curiosity about how the world works. He jumped from wanting to be a lawyer to an engineer and then uncovered his interest in business. Josh calls business “the glue of society.”

“Everything around you right now has been started or created by some type of business”

16:19 Josh’s Favorite Aspect of Researching

When researching, Josh loves to dive into the psychology aspect of business. People asked him why he included psychology in his book, The Personal MBA, but it is one of the most important parts of business.

“Business are created by people, run by people, for the benefit of other people”

Josh says that if you don’t have a working understanding of people, you will be at a social disadvantage and have increased problems with practical issues.

18:01 Deciding to Write The Personal MBA

During the early incarnation of The Personal MBA, Josh was just doing it for himself. He began the project during March of his senior year of college, starting by reading endless business books.

“If you read enough business books, what you’ll find is the same ideas come up over and over again”

Josh recognized a core of ideas that kept coming up.

“These ideas that keep coming up over and over again, those are the important ones, those are the ones we should learn first”

After a couple years started to outline what it would look like as a set.

“My goal for myself was to figure out what is that small set in each of these areas that is most valuable”

Josh was writing his work as a blog online and as he wrote more, more people were interested. At an event in New York City, Josh met Adrian Zackheim who planted the idea in Josh to write a book and set him up with an editor.

22:51 Serendipity in Josh’s Life

Josh believes there’s an element of luck and preparation when it comes to serendipitous moments.

“Looking back, all of the pieces into the right place at the right time”

Josh hadn’t even realized his personal project, The Personal MBA, was preparing him.

“Your knowledge, your skills, your life experience, all of that accumulates and then there can be instances in the world where you happen to be the key that fits this very convoluted lock”

24:50 What Separates Good and Great Business Leaders

Josh talks about the importance for business leaders to focus on the important areas and not become distracted by emotions and social status.

“The things that excellent business leaders are able and willing to do is take a look at a business situation and say which sides are extremely important and where they focus their productive capability”

29:20 Trading Novelty for Long Term Value

Josh describes how novelty is what attracts and sustains our attention.

“Our biology is ancient and our modern context is very new”

When Josh sits down to write, he blocks the internet so he doesn’t jump to something novel and new instead of focusing on the difficult thing in front of him

“There’s a certain amount of understanding how you work, altering the structure of the environment around you to make it easier to do things that are long term beneficial”

34:11 Speeding Up a Learning Curve

Josh explains that learning is based on knowledge and skill is the ability to do something in the world that has a specific desired end result. He says that the way that you acquire knowledge and the way you acquire skill are two very different things

The Personal MBA was a knowledge project while Josh’s second book The First 20 Hours was about the skill acquisition process.

“On the behavioral psychology side, how can you get yourself to do the practice to acquire the skill but then also get to the point where you are able to look at your performance as you’re practicing and self correct”

37:23 Josh’s Specific Feedback Loop

Josh uses an example from his research for his second book, The First 20 Hours to explain his specific feedback loop. The First 20 Hours is organized into two main parts; the first is about theory and the second is case studies.

One of these case studies, Josh learned how to touch type using a completely different keyboard.

“I wanted to have an example of relearning to do something you already know how to do in a different context”

The more times you repeat the process, the instantaneous feedback loop is extremely valuable.

41:18 Updating The Personal MBA

Josh’s goal when originally writing The Personal MBA was to make it as evergreen as possible.

“I was really pleasantly surprised at how much of the manuscript I didn’t need to change”

The main changes he made were updating references, examples, and studies to ensure they were accurate and true .

“It was really nice to have a chance with the benefit of time and distance and experience to go back and look at the entire book as a whole”

49:30 Josh’s Love for Reading Philosophy

Josh finds himself reading more and more philosophy books.

Two books he always comes back to are The Art of Worldly Wisdom and The Wastebooks.

Currently, Josh is deliberately not putting pressure on himself to begin planning research around a future book.

“For the first time in my career, I am giving myself permission to take a good, very distant step back in terms of career and choosing what the next project looks like”

He’s spending his time reading, researching, and experimenting in many areas.

53:40 Josh’s Research and Reading Process

Josh has two recommendations for nonfiction readers.

1. Preview of the book.

Before you read, take 10-15 min and flip through the whole thing and ask yourself questions.

Ex: What am I looking for? What are the main themes?

2. Take a detailed summary of the most important points of the book after a reading session.

“Rephrasing them and putting them into your own words is a really important act of synthesis that makes those ideas stick in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t”

58:26 If Josh could sit down and interview anyone dead or alive, who?

Charlie Munger , because Josh is curious as to what Charlie would include if he were to write his own personal MBA.

59:43 What Josh Hopes Readers Walk Away With

Josh says that the ideas in The Personal MBA are designed to be applicable to anyone in any industry, and particularly valuable to people without any business background.

The book is structured into three parts:

Part 1 : The 5 Core Parts of a Business

Creating something valuable, Marketing, Sales, Value Delivery, and Finance

Part 2: People

The human mind, working with yourself, working with others, cognitive bias

Part 3: Systems

How to operate a business at a large scale, analyze how the system is operating, improve the system, and avoid changing the system in ways that would have unintended consequences

Josh’s Resources

Preview of The Personal MBA

Access to essays and research on Josh’s personal website