Replication - Mental Model

The copying mechanism that keeps us alive.

Oct 30, 2025

I’m high above the ground, on a budget flight from Poland to Spain. It’s loud and uncomfortable, but it’s also one of my most productive environments.

I do my best writing in planes. No internet, no distractions, complete focus. Full disconnection.

So, I try to replicate it on the ground: closed door, headphones with white noise, wifi off, phone in plane mode. It works. The closer I get to those plane environments, the better.

Replication isn’t about duplicating everything. It’s about isolating what matters. Thankfully, I don’t need to listen to loud jet engines or sit in uncomfortable positions.

Mental Model

Cellular replication keeps us alive. We’re constantly replacing old cells with new ones throughout our lives. But replication can have errors. Healthy replication keeps us alive, while uncontrolled replication becomes cancer.

The difference between healthy and unhealthy replication in our bodies is control.

Replication, as a mental model, applies to many other domains outside of biology: understanding bugs, scaling systems, or repeating behaviours to accomplish something.

In Practice

Understanding

To understand how a specific thing operates, it’s useful to replicate it. It’s used widely in software engineering. We reproduce conditions when bugs occur, and create environments like staging to replicate production.

Production systems can replicate their instances to handle more traffic. But uncontrolled replication can get expensive. We need to handle the traffic, but also understand if replication is not enough and design optimisations are needed. When dealing with replication, monitor whether it’s manageable, and control it.

F1 teams build 60% scale cars to test them in wind tunnels. Due to budget restrictions, they can’t replicate the full car, so they focus on what matters and test scaled cars to understand how real cars behave. Replicas help them understand reality on the track.

Learning

Imagine you want to achieve the same as successful individuals. For example, you can copy everything that they are doing on social media, but it won’t work. Repeating blindly their actions won’t get you where they are. Your context and environment are different. Learning by replicating others’ actions can serve as a good learning material, but shouldn’t be applied without reflection.

Control when adapting others’ actions to your context, not just blindly copying.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
— Haruki Murakami

In the beginning, imitating others by replicating what they do can get you to average baseline performance. Think of it as an average answer from LLM, so it helps with starting, then your improvements should become incremental and evolutionary changes, not copies.

Productivity

I read books about productivity, but nothing is as effective as just doing what works for me, and cutting off everything that doesn’t work.

Don’t expect to find you’re doing everything right — the truth often hurts. The goal is to find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them and to find your strengths so you can multiply them.
— Tim Ferriss

My writing sessions on a plane were useful experiments to replicate back on the ground. I know that I don’t need specific calendar slots or Pomodoro timer, but I do need an environment without distractions. I control this replication by testing what works and eliminating what doesn’t.

Summary

Replication is a useful mental model that can help you understand what you are dealing with. But there is one key element that needs to be taken into consideration: control over the replication process.

Control helps with optimisation of our replications, from scaling servers and copying others’ actions to creating a productive work environment.

Ask yourself: