Nearly everything in life, as well as in business, can be represented by mathematical models. Even if you’re uncomfortable with math, your brain still creates models for a variety of activities, and the decisions that you make are significantly influenced by this modeling behavior. We do this instinctively, since there were distinct evolutionary advantages for our ancestors who were able to correctly gauge the chances that food (a good thing) was just around the corner, or that a lion (a bad thing) was lying in the tall grass. Unfortunately, our capacity for correctly gauging the probability of the occurrence of good or bad things is skewed by the way our primate brains are wired, which in some cases diminishes our ability to understand and anticipate the likely outcome of certain actions.