Nicolas Cole sources mental models from people like Alex Hormozi and books like Super Mental Models, but just reading isn't enough. He applies each concept to his own work, then writes about it. That act of articulation forces the idea to stick and become something he can actually teach.
I'm just curious where you learned your mental models. I have a book like the Super— I don't know if you've heard of that book. It's like, you know, Super Mental Models. Um, but where did you prime yourself for all of it? Because I'd love to know who your mentors are.
Um, first of all, it's funny, I was actually going to recommend that book. Um, that's a, that's a great book for that. Um, Admittedly, I think that Alex Hormozi is probably one of the best people I've ever discovered to articulate mental models. I have studied— I've studied his stuff religiously for the past few years, and I think he's really great at it. But the honest answer is a lot of these get crystallized through writing them. Like, I think there's a difference between input and then forcing yourself to try to articulate it yourself. So whenever I'm learning something, I'm not just consuming it. What I'm doing is I'm consuming it and then applying it to something in my life or applying it to something that I'm working on. And then I'll go turn that into content. Like, I will try, I will try to fit the new thing that I'm learning into my my situation and then have to articulate it to someone else. Because in articulating it, that's what crystallizes the, okay, how does this actually work, you know? Oh, sorry, you muted.
There you go. Yeah, sorry. Uh, I have read that, that that's being able to articulate it is just, you know, how it resonates in the brain. And then the, the skill that you develop being able to articulate it is You know, you can't really teach it to others or sell something to others until you can do it for yourself, right? So, okay. Yeah, I have Hormozy's books too, but thanks for sharing that. Yeah. So I need to put it into practice, like what you said.
Yeah, so I'll actually give you an example of something that I'm working through right now. So, I have been, for the past 2 years, I've been, one of the things that I've been trying to work on, because I've gotten very proficient at writing very quickly, but I think the next growth edge for me is actually doing the opposite and really slowing down and forcing myself to kind of get back to a sentence level of like, how do you tighten that up even more? How do you tighten that up even more? And I've been reading more, and a question that I've been asking myself to assemble a mental model is I've been reading a lot of literature and trying to ask myself, okay, if I take out a paragraph from a piece of literature, how do I categorically explain or articulate what's happening? Like, and what I mean by that is not just read a paragraph and go, that was fun, or that was interesting, or that was sad. No, like categorically, like what is actually happening in that paragraph? And on a sentence level, like why is the author saying this? And why is the author saying this? And why is the author saying this? And what is the ultimate output that that creates for me as a reader? Like really trying to ask like multifaceted questions. And as I've been working on this for the past 6 months, like really just trying to dig into like, How do people write things that elicit certain types of feelings in me? What I ended up realizing, and I'm not even really sure like when it clicked, but something that clicked for me is that all of writing and all, especially like fiction, literature, storytelling, if you think about what's happening at a category level, there's really 4 different types of sentences. There's explanation. I'm telling you— it's, it's, you know, everyone's like, "Show, don't tell," where there— well, there is a telling component. I'm telling you something that you need to know. I'm telling you a backstory. I'm telling you a piece of information. There's description, which is I'm not explaining something to you. I am describing something, and you extract your own conclusion from it. There is action. Which is something is happening, right? And then there is narration, which is the narrator inserting themselves. And like, we've all read those passages or pages where the author sort of peeks in and you're like, oh, that's the author's opinion coming through this page or this paragraph, right? And once this clicked for me, I was like, it fundamentally changed how I started reading. And now when I read, every sentence I read in my brain, I'm asking myself, what is this? Oh, this is explanation. And then the next sentence is action. And then they go back to explanation. And then the next 2 sentences are description. And what that does is that actually gives me almost like a little like color map. Like I think of these in colors, you know, if I'm like, okay, explanation is red and description is green and action is blue. And narration is purple, I can actually see the blend of like what makes this paragraph. Oh, this paragraph is like, you know, 70% explanation, 20% description, 10% action, you know? And then I'm like, oh, okay, so in order to elicit a similar feeling, I'm kind of just repeating the pattern. And so as I've been working through this myself, just for my own understanding, on my to-do list of something to write is to write a piece called Eden: Explanation, Description, Action, Narration, a storytelling framework. So I'm gonna go write this. And the reason I'm going to write it— yeah, I think it would be helpful. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting. Yeah, I think people will get out— get things out of it. But the fundamental reason why I'm going to write it is to clarify my own thinking. And that's, that's what, that's what makes writing or writing in the digital age such a virtuous loop, because as you learn things, you write about them, you share them, you get leverage on those learnings. But it also crystallizes your learnings, which allows you to learn faster, which improves your clarity of thinking. You know what I mean? By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading The Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing.
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