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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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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
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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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...
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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...
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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 wro...
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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 angu...
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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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CURATED FROM
For every question, there is an answer. For every problem, there is a solution. For everything else, there is an explanation.
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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 opposite was true? What if I focused on a different side of this situation? Instead of asking how to do so...
Never force anything. And don’t hold yourself down with things you can’t control.
Stop talking about the problem and start thinking about the solution. Forget what could go wrong for a sec and think of what is already right.
What if the ethical model you use is taken from the ethics prevailing in other countries? It could be irrelevant. Does that mean misguided thinking? NO!
Relevant thinking models? No. Doesn’t a relevant thinking model mean a realistic thinkin...
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