Show Notes
Get 20% off any STSI course with code 20FOR100 — start building your mental fitness today! In this special milestone episode, Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera of Cornell University celebrate the 100th episode of the Cabrera Lab Podcast by doing something big: ranking the top 10 themes that have emerged across the entire show. From simple rules creating complex results to embracing both-and thinking, from culture as shared mental models to seeing webs of causality instead of root causes, they rev...
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Get 20% off any STSI course with code COLLEGE20 — become a systems thinker today! In this episode, Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera ask a fundamental question: what is college actually supposed to do? As confidence in higher education declines, they argue that conversations about cost, careers, credentials, and politics may be missing the most important purpose of education: teaching people how to think. Information changes rapidly, careers evolve, and knowledge becomes outdated—but the ability...
Get 20% off any STSI course with code CAL20 — become a systems thinker today! In this episode, Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera explore a simple idea with big implications: your calendar is a mental model. What you schedule—and what you leave off—reveals something about how you organize your priorities, time, work, and life. Derek and Laura discuss how calendars, to-do lists, meetings, and deadlines can become useful tools, but can also create busyness, unnecessary pressure, and systems that qu...
Get 20% off any STSI course with code BRAIN20 — become a systems thinker today! In this episode, Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera deconstruct a familiar phrase: “That’s just the way it is.” They explore the difference between accepting reality and surrendering to an outdated mental model. Sometimes “that’s the way it is” means acknowledging a real constraint. Other times, it means accepting a pattern, policy, culture, or way of working simply because it has existed for a long time. ...
Get 20% off any STSI course with code IQ20 — become a systems thinker today! In this episode, Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera challenge the way we think about intelligence. They argue that most people do not have an intelligence problem—they have a problem with the structure of their thinking. Rather than defining “smart” by IQ, credentials, memorized information, or expertise, they explore intelligence as the ability to adapt to reality, reorganize information, solve novel problems, and respo...
Get 20% off any STSI course with code SMARTER20 — become a systems thinker today! In this episode, Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera tackle a deceptively difficult question: how do you explain systems thinking to someone who knows nothing about it? They start with one simple idea: your brain is constantly taking information and organizing it to create meaning. That meaning becomes your mental models—and those mental models directly shape your decisions, actions, emotions, and behaviors. Systems ...