Avoiding failure

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...

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...

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...

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.)

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...