JAMES CLEAR

• 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 ke...

• Inversion is a powerful thinking tool because it 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 ...

• 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 fai...

• 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....

• 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...

• 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.”

• 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 ...

• 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 eff...

• 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...

• 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.

• 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...

• 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 ...