
Think better by living the decision.
Practice difficult choices before real life raises the stakes. Explore the consequences, learn the thinking tool, and carry it into your next decision.

story episodes
to practice
drills
toolbox entry points
One skill. Three ways to build it.
Start with what you need today. No complicated onboarding.
Decision Stories
Make difficult choices, see the consequences, and uncover the thinking behind them.
Enter the story →◎Quick Drills
Practice spotting a pattern and choosing a better next move in about a minute.
Try a drill →⌘Decision Toolbox
Bring a real decision. Use a structured framework to think it through.
Work through a decision →Don't just know the model. Recognise when to use it.
Learn a tool, apply it to a situation, then revisit it later. A decision journal helps you compare what you expected with what actually happened.
Explore the mental models →Make a choice
Commit to a decision before seeing the explanation.
Understand the trade-off
See the blind spot, the model, and why it helps.
Use it again
Build a lasting habit through spaced practice and reflection.
Have a difficult decision right now?
Start with a practical framework. Make the next step clearer.
Questions people ask
What are mental models?
Mental models are compact ways of seeing how the world works — thinking tools like inversion (solve problems backwards), incentives (behavior follows rewards), and second-order thinking (trace the consequences of the consequences). The right model makes a confusing decision suddenly legible.
How is this different from reading a mental models book or blog?
Reading builds recognition; it doesn't build the reflex. Too Hard Pile is deliberate practice: short drills on realistic scenarios where you commit to an answer before anything is revealed, then spaced repetition brings each drill back so you keep practising the model.
Is Too Hard Pile free?
Yes — the free plan includes starter drills in two models, five decision journal entries, your first interactive decision story, and the complete Decision Toolbox, with no time limit. The Trailblazer plan ($39.99/year or $4.99/month, plus taxes) unlocks all 13 models and 1,300 drills. You can try a drill with no signup at all.
How long does daily practice take?
About five minutes. A session is ten short drills; spaced repetition decides which ones you see, so time goes to the models you're still fuzzy on rather than the ones you've mastered.
Which mental models does it cover?
Thirteen modules: four levels of inversion, first principles, second-order thinking, root cause analysis, incentives, premortem, risk and margin of safety, opportunity cost and trade-offs, deciding under uncertainty, and seeing the complete picture.
Why is this worth it? It's just… thinking.
Exactly — and thinking is the one skill sitting upstream of everything else. Your job, your money, your relationships, your health are mostly the sum of thousands of decisions, and nearly all of them get made in seconds, with whatever thinking happens to show up. You don't get to skip those decisions; you only get to choose how well-equipped you arrive. The aim is simple: get a little sharper at the calls you make, through repeated practice. One avoided bad hire, one caught sunk cost, one un-signed terrible lease. Those are the calls this trains you for. As Charlie Munger put it: "Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up." That's the whole pitch. That's the whole product.
Will this get boring?
Honestly? Around week two, a little — and that's the design working. The moment a drill starts to feel repetitive is the moment your brain has stopped needing to struggle with it, which is exactly what "second nature" means. Psychologists call the urge to quit right there the motivational dip. Everyone who's ever learned an instrument calls it Tuesday. Sit through a few "boring" reps and one day you notice yourself reaching for the model in a real decision — and that part never gets boring.
Why so much repetition? How is the platform designed?
On the two most boring findings in learning science — chosen on purpose. One: memory fades on a predictable curve (Ebbinghaus mapped it in 1885), so each drill comes back right before you'd forget it. That's spaced repetition. Two: skills become automatic through repeated, effortful retrieval — "neurons that fire together wire together," as Hebb's rule is summarized. Bruce Lee put it more bluntly: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." Or as Will Durant wrote, summing up Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." We didn't invent any of this — we just applied it to thinking.