I get a kick whenever I discover that two unconnected books both touch upon the same theme. It’s as if they’re in cahoots, holding secret meetings on my bookshelf. Or, in a less colourful world, as if I’m cottoning onto a pattern. Either way, it’s a buzz.
I felt that buzz recently, when reading Anne Lamott’s acerbic masterpiece Bird by Bird. In a section about training yourself to observe the world, Lamott describes a mental model:
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence.
Aha, I smell a connection: Mental models also played a starring role in Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace’s Creativity, Inc. In one chapter,The Unmade Future, Catmull and Wallace describe how important these models are for Pixar’s directors. For example, Brad Bird:
[Brad] has told me that he thinks of directing the way her thinks about skiing. In either pursuit, he says, if he tightens up or thinks too much, he crashes … “At some point, I realised that I was crashing because I was trying so hard not to crash.”
Or Andrew Stanton:
Andrew likens the director’s job to that of a ship captain, out in the middle of the ocean, with a crew that’s depending on him making land. The director’s job is to say, “Land is that way … You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side.”
Or Rich Moore:
On a Bug’s Life, Bob says, Andrew compared making a movie to an archaeological dig. This adds yet another element to the picture — the idea that as you progress your project is revealing itself to you … the idea that the movie is in there — think of David, trapped in Michelangelo’s block of marble — helps them stay on track and not lose hope.
What’s curious is that so many Pixar heavyweights — not to mention Anne Lamott — have deliberate mental models. Of course they sometimes feel — to steal Andrew Stanton’s Salty Dog metaphor — all at sea. When that happens, however, their mental models help steady the ship. Or, indeed, guide the archaeological dig.
As Catmull says:
I’ve come to respect that the most important thing about a mental model is that it enables whoever relies on it to get their job — whatever it is — done.
Which explains the buzz when I made the connection: up until that moment, I had never been conscious of mental models. I certainly didn’t have any tucked away, ready to dust off for difficult occasions. (The closest I’d come was my childhood cure for insomnia: imagining that I was flying through space on the back of a Transformer.) Yet, when so many people — and two whole books — agree … well, that’s a connection worth making.