Autobiography: Models of My Life

Overview
Models of My Life is an autobiographical memoir by Herbert A. Simon that traces the arc of a singular intellectual career. The narrative moves between personal reminiscence and lucid accounts of scientific work, showing how an early fascination with puzzles and formal reasoning matured into a lifetime of theoretical and empirical research. The book presents Simon's central conviction that rigorous models, whether formal or computational, are indispensable tools for understanding behavior in organisms and organizations.

Early influences and formation
Simon describes formative experiences that shaped his curiosity about decision processes, institutions, and problem solving. Encounters with mathematics, social science, and practical problems led him to combine formal modeling with careful empirical observation. He emphasizes how exposure to multiple traditions, economics, psychology, political science and mathematics, produced an orientation toward synthesis rather than disciplinary isolation.

Interdisciplinary method
A consistent theme is the value of crossing disciplinary boundaries to ask new questions and to build new methods. Simon illuminates how conceptual tools traveled between fields: economic models influenced psychological experiments, computational ideas reshaped approaches to cognition, and organizational theory drew on insights from decision science. He argues that the productive tensions between disciplines fostered creativity and led to more realistic, testable models of behavior.

Bounded rationality and decision making
One of the book's core intellectual contributions is the development of the bounded rationality concept. Simon explains the limitations of the classic "homo economicus" ideal and proposes satisficing as a descriptive alternative: agents seek solutions that are good enough under constraints of information, time, and computational capacity. These ideas reframed debates in economics, psychology and management, providing tools to study choice, attention, and adaptive behavior in real organizations.

Artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling
Simon recounts collaborations that helped found the field of artificial intelligence and pioneered computational models of thought. Working with collaborators such as Allen Newell, he describes the development of early programs like the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver, and how these projects linked theories of human problem solving with concrete algorithms. For Simon, computational models were not mere metaphors but instruments for discovering mechanisms of cognition and for testing theoretical claims.

Collaborations, institutions, and mentorship
Personal stories of colleagues and students recur throughout the memoir, illustrating a career cultivated through collaboration and institutional building. Simon reflects on the intellectual chemistry of research groups and the obligations of mentorship. He offers candid vignettes about the joys and frustrations of teamwork, the slow accretion of ideas, and the institutional work required to sustain long-term interdisciplinary programs.

Legacy and reflections
The memoir closes with reflections on the aims and limits of scientific modeling and on a life spent trying to blend theoretical rigor with substantive relevance. Simon's account highlights both specific achievements and a broader temperament: a willingness to revise cherished ideas in light of new evidence and a persistent belief that models, formal, computational, and conceptual, are central to understanding complex social and mental phenomena. His work left a lasting imprint across economics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and organizational theory, and the book offers a clear-eyed portrait of how one thinker sought to build general, usable knowledge about human behavior.