I still haven’t gotten used to hitting “publish.” Every time I share a new post, my stomach is full of butterflies. While I’ve grown more confident in doing so over time, the nerves are still there. As Steven Pressfield says in The War of Art, we are always battling The Resistance.
But last Monday, when I officially opened preorders for my upcoming book, The Journey to Phronesis, all of those emotions were heightened. I have poured my life into this project for the past 9 months, so I was anxious, terrified, and excited all at once.
I have been blown away by the well-wishes, shares, and early preorders that have come in this past week. As a first-time author, seeing that support means the world to me. So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Part 1 of the book focused on systems thinking. Its core ideas, such as interconnections, feedback, and boundaries, can help us to see the world differently. But seeing is not enough. To navigate life, we must engage with what we see, which brings us to the question: “Now what?”
We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with information. We need a set of tools to help us find it, interpret it, organize it, and act on it. That’s the purpose of Part 2. I like to call this our Thinker’s Toolkit. It’s about moving from a general awareness of what’s going on in the world to having the capability to engage with it. The chapters in this part are designed to equip you with the methods, frameworks, and mental models to make sense of complexity better.
Here’s a quick tour of the five chapters in Part 2. Each is dedicated to a specific skill that can help you move from simply consuming information to actively making sense of it. To reinforce these ideas, I’ve also filled these pages with lots of examples and whiteboard drawings.
Chapter 7: Asking Powerful Questions
Often, the knowledge we need isn’t readily available; it must be uncovered. In this chapter, I explain how powerful inquiry techniques, such as the Socratic method, can help us understand things more deeply. This chapter provides practical tactics for asking better questions, helping you find the information that lies just beneath the surface of a conversation or a problem.
Chapter 8: Evaluating and Interpreting Information
Finding information is only part of the battle. We have to make sense of it and determine what we should or shouldn’t believe. The word “misinformation” is thrown around a lot these days and implies that truth is always black and white, but reality is often far murkier. This chapter is about building a better mental filter — one that helps us to recognize our own biases, adopt a toolkit for skeptical inquiry, and embrace the humble process of continuously updating our beliefs as we learn new things.
Chapter 9: Visualizing Complexity
Visualization is a powerful storytelling medium. In this chapter, I explore how to read the stories told by the common graphs and curves we encounter throughout life. In addition, I show how to spot the deceptive tricks that are often used to mislead us, from truncated axes to misleading pictograms. The goal is to help us all become more discerning and critical consumers of visual information.
Chapter 10: Frameworks for Action
Information without structure is just noise. In this chapter, I share practical frameworks I’ve used throughout my 20-year career as a consultant. These tools, like the 2x2 matrix or distribution curves, are structured ways of thinking that help us to organize complexity, prioritize options, and make clear, deliberate decisions. These can help us turn a mess of data into a coherent plan of action.
Chapter 11: Essential Mental Models
If frameworks are tools for specific tasks, mental models are upgrades to our mind’s general operating system. In this final chapter of Part 2, I introduce the great Charlie Munger’s concept of a “latticework of mental models” and share some of the most impactful ones that can help us reason more effectively in any domain.
An Excerpt from Part 2
To give you a real sense of how these tools are presented in the book, here is an excerpt from the current manuscript. This excerpt opens Chapter 9: Visualizing Complexity. I start the chapter with a personal story about the moment in 2020 when the pandemic became real for me — a single chart that changed my entire perspective on an unfolding global crisis.
The Day the Future Arrived on a Chart
I remember the exact moment the COVID-19 pandemic became real for me. It wasn’t a news headline or a government announcement. It was a chart. In the first week of March 2020 – about a week and a half before everything shut down – I was looking at a simple graph of the cumulative case counts in the United States. The line was just beginning to curve upward, forming the unmistakable signature of an exponential growth curve. For most, this was still a small number, easy to dismiss. But for me, it was a terrifying glimpse into the future. I had been tracking the explosion of the virus in Italy, which was about two weeks ahead of the U.S. in its outbreak, and I had seen this exact same pattern before. I knew the story this chart was telling — that our lives were about to be significantly impacted.
My personal moment of dread soon became a global one, crystallized in another, even more powerful visual: the “Flatten the Curve” graphic. You likely saw this yourself in March 2020. The graphic contained two parabolic curves overlaid on a single chart. One was a sharp peak, soaring far above a dotted line labeled “Healthcare System Capacity.” The other, a smoother curve that stays safely below it. This single image translated a complex epidemiological system – with its feedback loops of transmission, hospitalization rates, and resource constraints – into an urgent and universally understandable story. That story had a clear villain (the steep, overwhelming peak) and a clear path to action (the collective effort to create a softer wave of cases and stay below the dotted line). This was far more than data; it was a narrative. The simple visual became one of the most effective high-leverage interventions in public consciousness, shaping the behavior of millions.
Stories like this reveal the central idea of this chapter: visuals are one of the most powerful storytelling mediums we have for making sense of complex systems. Yet, the ability to read these stories is not innate in everyone. During the pandemic, many highly intelligent and influential people failed to recognize the clear narrative the data was telling, dismissing the exponential threat until it was too late. This reveals a critical gap in our modern skillset. We are not trained to read a visual story, only to react to it. Our brains are wired to process images instantly and emotionally, which means we often form a judgment about them without engaging first in critical thought.
I hope this overview and excerpt give you a clearer picture of the practical, actionable tools the book aims to provide. The goal isn’t just to accumulate interesting ideas, but to build a durable toolkit that helps you to navigate the world with greater confidence.
The preorder campaign is now open and live until November 9. The early support has been incredible. If my approach to thinking and living resonates with you, and you’d like to support the project, preordering the book is the most meaningful way to do so.
