Muslim Mental Models

How to make better decisions as a Muslim

One of the things I class as part of my mission is to help Muslims ‘think’ more.

We have lost the art of thinking, whether that be critical thinking, understanding nuance, or even just having curiosity about things. Being purposeful is part of thinking. That’s why I’m fascinated with different types of ways of coming to truth, such as biomimicry and systems thinking. Another part of thinking is decision-making and having clarity, and something that hugely helps with that is mental models.

Mental models are shortcuts that help us understand and contextualise life.

According to the excellent Farnam St blog by Shane Parrish:

“Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.

The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and…