Looking across different disciplines for mental models can be extremely useful when identifying potential investments. It might be something that is just intuit

Looking across different disciplines for mental models can be extremely useful when identifying potential investments. It might be something that is just intuitive to you, but it is not for most people -- especially business students. A good example would be Michael Burry, who had Munger's talk on human misjudgment click when analyzing the housing/mortgage market. Munger's talk about human misjudgment was rooted in psychology and how perverse incentives can cause certain breakdowns to occur which lead to disastrous decision making. Let's say Burry and another analyst were looking at the same set of data during that period (early 2000s). The analyst might have just seen a great trend - loans are up, deposits are up, employment is up, house prices are up. Everything is climbing which makes it so banks appear more safe as an investment. Burry on the other hand, saw that data but came to a much more alarming conclusion. Right off the bat he started wondering what incentives create such prosperity and by digging deeper he was able to uncover that loan standards were being relaxed, that people were increasingly levering up, and that some banks were giving no-doc loans. So what did Burry do? He figured out the best way to go short - the credit default swap trade and he was really the first guy to do it as a means of protecting against subprime mortgages. Along the way he generated huge returns. You are right - you cannot get rich from worldly wisdom alone. But, if you incorporate mental models into your investment process you can often at least help protect against the downside. That in turn helps increase your ability to generate good returns.