It seems like they're never flustered. They can always answer questions on the fly.

I thought it was high IQ but it turns out that we can train our brains to do the same as well.

Welcome back to my channel, I'm Vicky.

And today we are talking about the one thing you can train your brain on in your order to think fast before you speak.

In the last video, we talked about the one thing you need to focus on when you're under high pressure and that is "Steer, don't follow."

In a nutshell, it means that when the other person is giving you pressure and you don't know where you're going,

you want to be able to take back the control and steer the conversation towards what you want to talk about instead of just following their logic.

If you want to see the details, you can check out this video below. I'll put the link in the description as well.

But before you go, I want to talk about why a lot of people struggle with making sure they steer and not follow.

And that's because a lot of people feel like it's hard to find a point they can steer the conversation towards,

they have to scramble and think, "OK, where do I want this conversation to go?"

So today, we'll address exactly that.

The reason a lot of us find it really difficult to steer a conversation on the fly towards a point that we want to talk about is because we haven't disciplined our mind to think in frameworks.

Frameworks are structures to help organize your thoughts so that you can identify the key levers that influence a result.

I think it's also important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy, 'cause it's kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles.

But you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, "OK, what are we sure is true or as sure as possible is true," and then reason up from there.

For example, revenue equals number of units times price.

This is a framework for knowing what influences revenue.

There are only two things, either you sell more units or you increase the price or you increase both.

So whenever someone talks about "how can my company make more money," you know exactly what to say.

It doesn't matter what version of the story it is.

If their question is about revenue and they want to know how to grow it. It's very simple.

You either talk about the number of units, they can sell, how they can increase that or increase their price and how they might do that or even increase both if there is an opportunity to do so.

So immediately, any question that talks about revenue, you can always bring it back to these two levers, number of units and price. So simple, right?

So now it doesn't matter what people throw at you in terms of a company making revenue.

(It) doesn't matter (that) they say the vision of this and the strategic priorities of that and the marketing creatives of this and that. (It) doesn't matter.

You always come back to either number of units sold, the price or both of them.

And the goal for framework thinking is to have a library of these frameworks on topics that are important to you that you can talk about.

And pro tip: If you can connect different frameworks, then the amount of depth and insights you can provide is even greater.

Let me give you just a simple example.

So we talked about revenue but a lot of people want to focus on profits as well.

So how can I make more money to take home?

Now here, you can use the very simple framework, again - profit equals revenue minus cost.

Revenue, we've already talked about; cost, you can separate it into marginal cost and fixed cost.

So now, if people want to talk about "how can I make more profits?" you know exactly, again, what to talk about: you have to increase your revenue or you have to decrease your cost,

and pick one to focus on, then you can double click into that topic.

Now, you've got the revenue framework.

You can say, "If you want to increase your revenue, let's look at how many units are you selling?"

"What is the price?"

"How can we tweak these things?"

Or if you want to talk about cost, you can say, "OK, let's look at the cost structure."

"Where can you take things out?"

"Is it in the fixed cost or is it in the marginal cost?"

And this way, now, if people ask you, you know, "How can I make more money?"

You know exactly what to talk about.

You can use these frameworks as almost an assessment.

Tell me your situation and I will tell you what you can tweak.

So that in essence is, you know, how consulting firms sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of projects, millions of dollars of projects based on frameworks like this.

As Charlie Munger says, "You can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang'em back.

If the facts don't hang together on the latticework of theory, you don't have them in a useful form."

To think fast, you need to put your knowledge into frameworks, sort them, organize them,

so you can very quickly recall what you want to talk about and what are the key levers that make sense.

So where do you find these frameworks?

They don't really teach them in school, right?

Well, there are two ways I'll share with you and the first one is to create them yourself.

And it's really not that hard. Hear me out here.

Apple teaches their employees with Picasso's art, The Bull.

Picasso was drawing these bulls, trying to capture the essence of it.

He calls the spirit of the beast.

And as you see at the beginning, everything is very realistic.

There's a lot of detail, but as he iterates, he tries to bring it down to the skull and eventually down to something very abstract, just a few lines.

To represent the horns, to represent the body, to represent the legs.

And so we want to do the same things. Distill the things we know down to the very essence of it.

Once you know the essence, then you can think faster.

Because all you need to look for in your brain is a structure and not just one piece of information that takes a lot of sorting through, that takes a lot of memory space.

But if you're just looking for one structure, it's a lot quicker.

And that's how people think fast on their feet.

For example, I work in business storytelling and there are quite a few frameworks for that.

One of the ones I use is ethos, pathos and logos, which means credibility, emotions, and logic.

Now, whenever people come to me with a question about, "Hey, why is my presentation not very compelling?"

"Why don't people take action when they visit my website" or "Why is my marketing message not working?"

I start there.

Let's look at the three levers and let's see what you're doing right now.

By seeing the essence of something and then having multiple frameworks that connect,

you're going to be able to talk about a variety of things very quickly because you know the structures and you can connect them together.

Now, if you feel like "Whoa, this is way too much work. I don't want to start from scratch."

That's OK.

Let's talk about the second way of finding frameworks.

Finding hidden frameworks on the internet.

Now, why do I say hidden because we're not trained to think in frameworks when we find information on the internet,

most of the authors who have done a lot of condensing and finding the key levers to problems, they don't call it a framework.

So all you have to do is take that information and structure it so that it becomes a framework for you to reference it very easily when you are thinking fast before you talk.

Let's use an example to make this more concrete.

Say you're talking about how to make money doing what you love.

There isn't per se a framework out there on Google.

But there is this concept of ikigai, which means the purpose of your life in Japanese.

And already, ikigai breaks down the four elements, the four key levers you need in order to make money doing what you love.

They are: what you love, what you're good at, what you can be paid for and what the world needs.

So easy. All the work is done for you.

All you need to do is just remember that there are four levers there and you make that connection between the four levers and the topic which is how to make money doing what you love.

So now, whenever people ask you, "Hey, I hate my job, I don't know what to do. How can I be happy and make money doing what I really love?"

you can just take these four levers and talk them through it.

Of course, the information, you provide might still be very surface level.

Unless you have the expertise, you have the experience.

So with that in mind, really, it's about building that library of frameworks so that you can expand the things that you can talk about very comfortably.

And then you have the direction, knowing which areas, which topics, which levers I need to look further into in order to expand.

If you're interested in learning more mental models or frameworks, let me know in the comments below, I can always share the ones I use almost on a daily basis.

And if you found this helpful, please give this a thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't already.

It really helps the channel and I'll see you in the next video.