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Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You
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Inversion
It is a mental model, a way of thinking backward about what you don’t want to happen. It is about taking an idea upside down and thinking about what could go wrong.
Inversion is a powerful thinking tool because it puts a spotlight on errors and roadblocks that are not obvious at first glance.
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Avoiding failure
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.
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Project Management
Failure Premortem/ Kill the company: one of the applications of inversion, in which you imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now, then 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?
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Productivity
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.
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Decluttering
Marie Kondo, the author of 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.” This shift in mindset inverts decluttering by focusing on what you want to keep rather than what you want to discard.
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Relationships
Inverting a good marriage can show you how to avoid a bad one.
Ask yourself what behaviors might ruin a marriage ( Lack of trust, not respecting the other person, not letting each person have time to be an individual, etc.)
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Personal Finance
Ask yourself how could you destroy your financial health.
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.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
4
Key Ideas
Inversion
Is the way of thinking in which you consider the opposite of what you want.
Inversion puts a spotlight on errors and roadblocks that are not obvious at first glance. What if the opposi...
The "kill the company" strategy
The idea is to identify challenges and points of failure so you can develop a plan to prevent them ahead of time.
Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Then fast forward 6 months and assume the project or goal has failed. Tell the story of how it happened and ask yourself, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?”
Inversion and productivity
Applying inversion to productivity you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?”
The answer to these question may help you discover interruptions you can eliminate to free up more time and energy each day.
10
Key Ideas
Stoic Philosophy
Stoicism acknowledges the challenges we face and teaches us practical lessons so that we may overcome whatever stands in our way. By taking a practical approach to happiness, we learn how to mainta...
Epictetus
“Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will—then your life will flow well.”
Suffering and Desire
Buddha taught that there is suffering in this world, it is inevitable, and the root cause of suffering is mainly the desires we feel.
We want something, always, and feel miserable when we don't get it.
Stoicism teaches us to live in accordance with nature and to accept that suffering will manifest in different ways in our lives.
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Key Ideas
Know How To Perceive Negative Emotions
Severe chronic worriers are less accepting of their emotions, meaning they're intolerant of uncertainty and negative emotions.
Meanwhile, non-worriers tend to look a...
Ask The Right Questions.
- Is it my problem?
- Do I have any control over it?
- Have I already done everything about it that I can? And is it imminent?
See Positive Outcomes
A worrier would likely only think of the worst-case scenario, while a non-worrier would have the capacity to think that there could be a positive outcome to a negative event.