By the time I was eight, the adults around me were talking about putting me on medication. I still couldn’t read, and the verdict was more or less in: something was wrong with me.
Nothing was wrong with me. It took me years to understand what had actually been happening —
Jargon was burying the understanding.
Back then I had no language for any of this. All I noticed was that some people explained things differently — they’d reach for an analogy, or drop the idea into a real situation, and suddenly it was tangible. It clicked. The terminology had been a wall; a good analogy was a door. I figured those people were just being kind enough to dumb it down for me. I wasn’t slow. I’d been handed the wrong tools.
Only years later did I see it for what it was. Those weren’t dumbed-down explanations — they were shortcuts to understanding, the same thing a mental model does for the mind: it takes something tangled and collapses it into a shape you can actually hold. And traditional education almost never teaches this way. It rewards memorizing the terms over grasping the idea — and calls that intelligence.
But the people who think in models, not memory, learn and internalize and apply far faster than anyone stuck memorizing definitions. The shortcut was never a crutch for the slow kid. It was an advantage the system never taught me to use.
So I started collecting them, and never stopped. I’ve read the books; I have the highlights to prove it — Gall’s law, Goodhart’s law, via negativa, mimetic desire. I could recite them over dinner.
I just couldn’t reach for them when it counted.
Knowing a model and reaching for it are two different skills. The moment a real decision is in front of you, your mind doesn’t surface the right framework — it surfaces whatever you saw most recently, or whatever everyone around you is doing. For years my list grew into the hundreds, and I missed the irony completely: I’d turned the shortcuts back into the thing I’d escaped — a pile of terms to memorize. A model sitting in a file is just trivia. Flashcards, re-reading, highlighting and hoping — none of it changed the one thing that mattered: I could spot any of these models the instant I saw them on a page, and not one of them ever came to me on its own when a real decision was in front of me.
I didn’t need another collection. I needed practice — but not the kind I grew up hating. The lesson from when I was eight turned out to be the whole thing: the bottleneck was never how smart I was — it was whether the right tool showed up when I needed it, before the doubt did.
So I stopped collecting models and started practicing them — the way you actually get good at anything: by meeting it in one real situation after another, not by memorizing what it’s called.
That’s what Ida is. Not a library of mental models — a training ground for them. It drops you into a scenario pulled from real life — a decision that feels like one of yours — and lets you feel the model work, instead of reading what it means. Then it brings that model back in a new situation, and another, until it stops being a definition you sort of remember and becomes the way you actually see.
If you’ve got a list of frameworks you never actually use, this is for you. Not because you don’t know enough. Knowing was never the bottleneck.
By the time I was eight, the adults around me were talking about putting me on medication. I still couldn’t read, and the verdict was more or less in: something was wrong with me.
Nothing was wrong with me. It took me years to understand what had actually been happening —
Jargon was burying the understanding.
Back then I had no language for any of this. All I noticed was that some people explained things differently — they’d reach for an analogy, or drop the idea into a real situation, and suddenly it was tangible. It clicked. The terminology had been a wall; a good analogy was a door. I figured those people were just being kind enough to dumb it down for me. I wasn’t slow. I’d been handed the wrong tools.
Only years later did I see it for what it was. Those weren’t dumbed-down explanations — they were shortcuts to understanding, the same thing a mental model does for the mind: it takes something tangled and collapses it into a shape you can actually hold. And traditional education almost never teaches this way. It rewards memorizing the terms over grasping the idea — and calls that intelligence.
But the people who think in models, not memory, learn and internalize and apply far faster than anyone stuck memorizing definitions. The shortcut was never a crutch for the slow kid. It was an advantage the system never taught me to use.
So I started collecting them, and never stopped. I’ve read the books; I have the highlights to prove it — Gall’s law, Goodhart’s law, via negativa, mimetic desire. I could recite them over dinner.
I just couldn’t reach for them when it counted.
Knowing a model and reaching for it are two different skills. The moment a real decision is in front of you, your mind doesn’t surface the right framework — it surfaces whatever you saw most recently, or whatever everyone around you is doing. For years my list grew into the hundreds, and I missed the irony completely: I’d turned the shortcuts back into the thing I’d escaped — a pile of terms to memorize. A model sitting in a file is just trivia. Flashcards, re-reading, highlighting and hoping — none of it changed the one thing that mattered: I could spot any of these models the instant I saw them on a page, and not one of them ever came to me on its own when a real decision was in front of me.
I didn’t need another collection. I needed practice — but not the kind I grew up hating. The lesson from when I was eight turned out to be the whole thing: the bottleneck was never how smart I was — it was whether the right tool showed up when I needed it, before the doubt did.
So I stopped collecting models and started practicing them — the way you actually get good at anything: by meeting it in one real situation after another, not by memorizing what it’s called.
That’s what Ida is. Not a library of mental models — a training ground for them. It drops you into a scenario pulled from real life — a decision that feels like one of yours — and lets you feel the model work, instead of reading what it means. Then it brings that model back in a new situation, and another, until it stops being a definition you sort of remember and becomes the way you actually see.
If you’ve got a list of frameworks you never actually use, this is for you. Not because you don’t know enough. Knowing was never the bottleneck.
Ida+