Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You

• The German mathematician Carl Jacobi, 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.

• 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.
• As example, popular articles by JC, “Forget About Setting Goals” and “Motivation is Overvalued”, take common notions and turn them on their head.

• 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.”

• Avoiding mistakes is an under-appreciated way to improve.
• Sometimes it is more important to consider why people fail in life than why they succeed.

• One of 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, now fast forward six months and assume the goal has failed.

Tell the story What went wrong? How did it fail? In other words, think of your main goal and ask yourself, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?”

• 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. 

• Project Management,
• Productivity,
• Decluttering,
• Relationships, 
• Personal Finance.

• Applying inversion to productivity you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?”
• For example, some people take 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.

• Leaders can ask themselves, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible manager?”
• Innovators can ask, “How could we make this company less innovative?” Eliminating those barriers and obstacles might help creative ideas arise more quickly.
• Marketing Department Strategists, “What would alienate our core customer?”
• A different point of view can reveal surprising insights.

• Marie Kondo, author of the blockbuster best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, uses inversion to help people declutter 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.

• 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.

• How could you destroy your financial health?
• Spending more than you earn is a proven path to financial failure.
• 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.

• 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?
• In conclusion. It is a way to counteract the gravitational pull of confirmation bias.

• 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.
• To Increase productivity using this phenomenon, we understand blindly chasing success can have severe consequences, but preventing failure usually carries very little risk.

For Further inquisitive and prying :

• Inversion as a Critical Thinking Approach : Behaviours Associated.
• Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You!
• Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.