It hit me the other day that I’ve circled the idea of ‘models’ in different forms for decades at different points in my life. As a child, I played with model cars – little toy versions of famous brands like Ferrari, Mercedes Benz, and others. As a teenager, I modelled briefly for a few magazine shoots and runway shows. Then I switched over to the other side and began shooting models as a photographer.
When AI arrived, I began playing around with “voice models” — analyses of someone’s previous writing in order to generate a framework of how they write. This helped us generate future content as closely to the client’s voice as possible (they were aware we were building these models and provided us the material). Voice models were a huge part of my agency’s success in the early days, as it allowed us to scale content production quickly.
The technology behind tools like ChatGPT are also known as “large language models” — data used to train an AI system for a particular task (in this case, to generate new content based on prompts). The concept of agentic AI later piqued my interest, and I wrote a white paper on agentic AI in journalism.
This brings me to my one of my favourite concepts: that of “mental models”. I believe mental models dictate the kind of lives we each live, as the right mental models gives you an edge while the wrong ones set you up for failure.
Mental models around decision-making, productivity, relationships, and even health and fitness all determine whether we’ll enjoy our brief time here or not. If you believe you’ll die before 50, you may not bother eating right, working out, or preserving close relationships. If, on the other hand, you expect to live to 150, you may approach life with a longevity mindset — leading to changes in diet, exercise, stress, workload, and relationships. Each mental model becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Same with investing and risk management: the right mental models around how and whether to buy stocks (or ETFs) will determine your eventual wealth, while a mental model based on speculation will eventually make you broke.
Here’s to the models that have shaped our lives. 🥂
Mo Shehu, Ph.D. writes and speaks. You can find him online @shehuphd everywhere.