I came across an interesting product through the power of social media marketing. It's called the unstuck box. It looked interesting, and I thought... Hmm... getting unstuck would be cool.
I checked out the website, and I thought "why not?".
Well... today it arrived, and this has probably been the best $35.00 I've spent in a bit! I spent some time through the day going through the cool little cards that come in it, and showed people around the office at work.
Never in my life did I think a simple deck of cards would have the ability to solve so many of my problems...
There were a lot of cool ideas that I've heard of and talk about... but there were many that I were not familiar with, and the way that this was put together made it so much more tangible!
There are so many good frameworks in your pocket that you can pull out anytime.
One of the girls at the office liked it so much, she sent me this PDF from The Unstuck Box website... so now she is getting a full set, on the company's expense card.
(These guys are killing it with the marketing!)
The Unstuck box is a set of 48 cards that have little hand-drawn illustrations on the front. Each card explains and gives examples of a principle or mental framework on the back!
The website calls it "A Career Coach in a Box"... which sounds pretty cool, and it is!
The cards are meant to be used a tool to help solve your problems and it comes in a cool little rigid cardboard case so that you can carry them around with you.
There are a couple different categories that the cards touch on:
What I find even cooler part is lots of teams at successful organizations use the Unstuck Box... like Google, Salesforce, Amazon... even the U.S. Air Force!
They say success leaves clues.. and this looks like a HUGE clue to help build more effective teams.
They say "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change". I think this is so true.
This little cardboard box has 48 principles, across five categories and each of them can be used as a framework to solve a problem!
It's such a simple tool... but so valuable!
What I find is that looking at a problem with the right "lens" on, is usually the best first step to solving it!
One of the primary things I do as leader of my company is to analyze and solve problems. Sometimes this means that I have to find the right way to look at a problem. Having these cards on hand give me something tangible to look at and to check my perspective on the issue I am solving!
Another big part of my job, is to create leaders within the company and to help other people become better at their job. With a rapidly growing team, I find that being an effective teacher is becoming more and more important everyday.
Having a set of cards with so many different principles, helps give me a talking point. I've already used some of them to explain concepts with the team, and they seem to grasp issues more easily and get get excited about what we are taking about!
Charlie Munger was one of the first people that I heard talk about mental models. Here's something insightful that he's said at some point about them:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.” -- Charlie Munger
The more I researched it, the more I found that many of the people that I look up to utilize these same thinking tools. The problems and thinking that these billionaire type people do at this scale is unfathomable to me where I am at right now... but it is something to shoot for!
Having the models in my head is maybe the first step.
The way I visualize this, in the construction lens that I often revert back to is... mental models are power tools for your brain! The crazy part is some of these mental models are not just power tools, they're BULL DOZERS! lol
The Unstuck Box has really inspired me to write more about mental models, in an effort to help me better understand how to use, explain and implement them in my daily life. I'll be sharing more about these... and hope you can find some useful ones for a situation that you maybe dealing with.
I like this product so much... I really just wanted to share it with people that might find it useful. If this sounds like something you might be interested, you can get yourself a copy here:
https://unstuckbox.com/products/the-unstuck-box
There's really nothing in it for me, but if it's something that helps you then putting this together was worth the time!
Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with this product, I just think it would be cool to share with people, and writing about it will help me understand it better!