Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You
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Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You
by James Clear
The
ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus
regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which
translates to a “premeditation of evils.”
The
goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in
life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their
job and become homeless or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed or to have
their reputation ruined and lose their status in society.
The
Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they
could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to
prevent them. While most people were focused on how they could achieve success,
the Stoics also considered how they would manage failure. What would things
look like if everything went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about
how we should prepare today?
This
way of thinking, in which you consider the opposite of what you want, is known
as inversion. When I first learned of it, I didn't realize how powerful it
could be. As I have studied it more, I have begun to realize that inversion is
a rare and crucial skill that nearly all great thinkers use to their
advantage.
How to Solve Problems by Reversing Them
The
German mathematician Carl Jacobi made a number of important contributions to
different scientific fields during his career. In particular, he was known for
his ability to solve hard problems by following a strategy of man muss immer umkehren or,
loosely translated, “invert, always invert.”
Jacobi
believed that one of the best ways to clarify your thinking was to restate math
problems in inverse form. He would write down the opposite of the problem he
was trying to solve and found that the solution often came to him more easily.
Inversion
forces you to consider aspects of a situation that are often hidden at first
glance. What if the opposite was true? What if I focused on a different side of
this situation? Instead of asking how to do something, ask how to not do it.
As
author Josh Kaufman writes, “By studying the opposite of what you want, you can
identify important elements that aren't immediately obvious.”
How Great Thinkers Shatter the Status Quo
Great
thinkers, icons, and innovators think forwards and backwards. They consider the
opposite side of things. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse.
Art
provides a good example.
One
of the biggest musical shifts in the last several decades came from Nirvana, a
band that legitimized a whole new genre of music—alternative rock—and
whose Nevermind album is
memorialized in the Library of Congress as one of the most “culturally,
historically or aesthetically important” sound recordings of the 20th
century.
Nirvana
turned the conventions of mainstream rock and pop music completely upside down.
Where hair metal bands like Poison and Def Leppard spent millions to produce
each record, Nirvana recorded Nevermind for $65,000.
Where hair metal was flashy, Nirvana was stripped-down and raw.
Inversion
is often at the core of great art. At any given time there is a status quo in
society and the artists and innovators who stand out are often the ones who
overturn the standard in a compelling way.
Great
art breaks the previous rules. It is an inversion of what came before. In a
way, the secret to unconventional thinking is just inverting the status quo.
This
strategy works equally well for other creative pursuits like writing. Many
great headlines and titles use the power of inversion to up-end common
assumptions. As a personal example, two of my more popular articles, “Forget
About Setting Goals” and “Motivation
is Overvalued”, take common notions and turn them on their head.
Success is Overvalued. Avoiding Failure Matters More.
This
type of inverse logic can be extended to many areas of life. For example,
ambitious young people are often focused on how to achieve success. But billionaire
investor Charlie Munger encourages them to consider the inverse of success
instead.
“What
do you want to avoid?” he asks. “Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability.
If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are. You’re going to
crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an
automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and
unreliability.”
Avoiding
mistakes is an under-appreciated way to improve. In most jobs, you can enjoy
some degree of success simply by being proactive and reliable—even if you are
not particularly smart, fast, or talented in a given area. Sometimes it is more
important to consider why people fail in life than why they succeed.
The Benefits of Thinking Forwards and Backwards
Inversion
can be particularly useful in the workplace.
Leaders
can ask themselves, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible
manager?” Good leaders would likely avoid those things.
Similarly,
if innovation is a core piece of your business model you can ask, “How could we
make this company less innovative?” Eliminating those barriers and obstacles
might help creative ideas arise more quickly.
And
every marketing department wants to attract new business, but it might be
useful to ask, “What would alienate our core customer?” A different point of
view can reveal surprising insights.
You
can learn just as much from identifying what doesn't work as you can from
spotting what does. What are the mistakes, errors, and flubs that you want to
avoid? Inversion is not about finding good advice, but rather about finding
anti-advice. It teaches you what to avoid and shows you what you have been
missing.
Here
are some more ways to utilize inversion in work and life:
Project Management
One
of my favorite applications of inversion is known as a Failure Premortem. It is
like a Premeditation of Evils for the modern day company.
It
works like this:
Imagine
the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Now fast
forward six months and assume
the project or goal has failed.
Tell
the story of how it happened. What went wrong? What mistakes did you make? How
did it fail?
This
strategy is sometimes called the “kill the company” exercise in organizations
because the goal is to spell out the exact ways the company could fail. Just
like a Premeditation of Evils, the idea is to identify challenges and points of
failure so you can develop a plan to prevent them ahead of time.
Productivity
Most
people want to get more done in less time. Applying inversion to productivity
you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up
distracted?” The answer to that question may help you discover interruptions
you can eliminate to free up more time and energy each day.
This
strategy is not only effective, but often safer than chasing success. For
example, some people take drugs or mental stimulants in an effort to increase
their productivity. These methods might work, but you also run the risk of
possible side effects.
Meanwhile,
there is very little danger in leaving your phone in another room, blocking
social media websites, or unplugging your television. Both strategies deal with
the same problem, but inversion allows you to attack it from a different angle
and with less risk.
This
insight reveals a more general principle: Blindly chasing success can have
severe consequences, but preventing failure usually carries very little risk.
De-cluttering
Marie
Kondo, author of the blockbuster best-seller The Life-Changing Magic
of Tidying Up, uses inversion to help people de-clutter their homes. Her
famous line is, “We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want
to get rid of.”
In
other words, the default should be to give anything away that does not “spark
joy” in your life. This shift in mindset inverts de-cluttering by focusing on
what you want to keep rather than what you want to discard.
Relationships
What
behaviors might ruin a marriage? Lack of trust. Not respecting the other
person. Not letting each person have time to be an individual. Spending all of
your time on your kids and not investing in your relationship together. Not
having open communication about money and spending habits. Inverting a good
marriage can show you how to avoid a bad one.
Personal Finance
Everyone
wants to make more money. But what if you inverted the problem? How could you
destroy your financial health?
Spending
more than you earn is a proven path to financial failure. It doesn’t matter how
much money you have, the math will never work out for you over time. Similarly,
accumulating debt is a hair-on-fire emergency to be resolved as quickly as
possible. And gradually creeping into unchecked shopping and spending habits
can lead to self-inflicted financial stress.
Before
you worry too much about how to make more money make sure you have figured out
how to not lose money. If you can manage to avoid these problems, you'll be far
ahead of many folks and save yourself a lot of pain and anguish along the way.
Consider the Opposite
Inversion
is counterintuitive. It is not obvious to spend time thinking about the
opposite of what you want.
And
yet inversion is a key tool of many great thinkers. Stoic practitioners
visualize negative outcomes. Groundbreaking artists invert the status quo.
Effective leaders avoid the mistakes that prevent success just as much as they
chase the skills that accelerate it.
Inversion
can be particularly useful for challenging your own beliefs. It forces you to
treat your decisions like a court of law. In court, the jury has to listen to
both sides of the argument before making up their mind. Inversion helps you do
something similar. What if the evidence disconfirmed what you believe? What if
you tried to destroy the views that you cherish? Inversion prevents you from making
up your mind after your first conclusion. It is a way to counteract the
gravitational pull of confirmation bias.
Inversion
is an essential skill for leading a logical and rational life. It allows you to
step outside your normal patterns of thought and see situations from a
different angle. Whatever problem you are facing, always consider the opposite
side of things.
FOOTNOTES
1. Hat tip to
Ryan Holiday. I learned about the “premeditatio malorum” in his article, Practice the Stoic Art
of Negative Visualization. His books on Stoicism are great
as well. I recommend starting with The Obstacle is the Way.
2. Inversion
is different than working backward or “beginning with the end in mind.” Those
strategies keep the same goal and approach it from a different direction.
Meanwhile, inversion asks you to consider the opposite of your desired result.
3. A variety
of math textbooks claim that “invert, always invert” was one of Jacobi's
favorite phrases. The oldest source I could find was the Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society, Volume 23. 1917.
5. 10 years later, Cobain
lives on in his music, TODAY. Also, see For The Record: Quick
News On Gwen Stefani, Pharrell Williams, Ciara, ‘Dimebag' Darrell, Nirvana,
Shins & More, MTV.
6. Sandford
1995, p. 181
8. The term
“Failure Premortem” was coined by psychologist Gary Klein in 2007.
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