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Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You
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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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.
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Key Ideas
"You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
Marcus Aurelius
Premeditate
Premeditation is one of the most powerful of the Stoic tools for coping with stress. Is involves visualizing the future and imagining all the bad things that could happen.
This puts things in perspective. We tend to blow things up in our minds and make them appear much larger than they really are. By imagining all of the worst things that could happen, you come back down to earth and realize the present isn’t so bad.
Act Like You’re Not Stressed
Stoics thought that, when experiencing a heavy emotion or mental state such as anger or stress, adopting the behavior of someone who feels the opposite way can actually help us alter our state.
Scientific evidence indicates that things like body language and forcing a smile can actually change our mental state, making us happier, less stressed, and more confident.
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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.