Mental Models for Career Changes
Rosie / Farnam Street · 2020
"A career change is best approached with a stack of specific mental models — velocity (direction, not just motion), inversion (working backward from the desired end-state), exaptation (repurposing existing skills for new uses), map-vs-territory (getting real information, not just impressions), and the 'Bayesian casino' (quantifying your actual confidence with a hypothetical bet) — rather than by pure gut feeling."
The piece stacks five models for career decisions: velocity (are you moving with purpose toward a defined destination, not just staying busy); inversion (work backward from your desired end state to identify what needs to be true along the way); exaptation (your existing skills, like traits evolved for one purpose, may transfer to a completely different use than they were built for); map-vs-territory (talk to people actually doing the job, including those who quit, not just the highlight-reel version); and the Bayesian casino (imagine literally betting real money on an outcome to surface how confident you actually are).
The exaptation model matters specifically because it counters 'functional fixedness' — the tendency to see your skills only through the lens of their original use (e.g., 'I'm good at status updates' rather than 'I can parse complex information for a non-expert audience and build trust quickly'), which is exactly the kind of reframing that reveals genuinely transferable capability across a career change that looks, on the surface, unrelated to your current path.
What is exaptation, as used in this piece's career-change framework?
Read more about the topic
The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- InversionFarnam Street
- Bayes' Theorem and the Deadweight of Prior BeliefFarnam Street
5 Mental Models to Remove (Some of) the Confusion from Parenting
"Rather than adopting rigid parenting tactics that may not fit your specific child, five underlying principles — adaptation, velocity, algebraic equivalence, seizing the middle, and inversion — generalize across any family, situation, or child, because they're principles rather than one-size-fits-all scripts."