From Shane Parrish’s “The Great Mental Models”
Inversion
“Inversion is a powerful tool to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove obstacles to success. The root of inversion is “invert,” which means to upend or turn upside down. As a thinking tool it means approaching a situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point. Most of us tend to think one way about a problem: forward. Inversion allows us to flip the problem around and think backward. Sometimes it’s good to start at the beginning, but it can be more useful to start at the end. Think of it this way: Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. Combining the ability to think forward and backward allows you to see reality from multiple angles.”
“There are two approaches to applying inversion in your life. Start by assuming that what you’re trying to prove is either true or false, then show what else would have to be true. Instead of aiming directly for your goal, think deeply about what you want to avoid and then see what options are left over.”
“The head of the company thought that they needed to convince women that smoking would make them thinner, riding on the slimness trend that had already begun, so he hired Edward Bernays, who came up with a truly revolutionary marketing campaign.3,4 In the style of the inversion approach described above, Bernays did not ask, “How do I sell more cigarettes to women?” Instead, he wondered, if women bought and smoked cigarettes, what else would have to be true? What would have to change in the world to make smoking desirable to women and socially acceptable? Then—a step farther—once he knew what needed to change, how would he achieve that?”
“What are you trying to avoid? Instead of thinking through the achievement of a positive outcome, we could ask ourselves how we might achieve a terrible outcome, and let that guide our decision-making.”
The index fund operates on the idea that accruing wealth has a lot to do with minimizing loss. Think about your personal finances. Often we focus on positive goals, such as “I want to be rich,” and use this to guide our approach. We make investing and career choices based on our desire to accumulate wealth. We chase after magical solutions, like attempting to outsmart the stock market. These inevitably get us nowhere, and we have usually taken some terrible risks in the process which actually leave us worse off. Instead, we can try inverting the goal. It becomes, not getting rich, but avoiding being poor.
“Whatever angle you choose to approach your problem from, you need to then follow with consideration of the opposite angle. Think about not only what you could do to solve a problem, but what you could do to make it worse—and then avoid doing that, or eliminate the conditions that perpetuate it.”
“She demonstrated that the leading cause of death by far was poor sanitation. In her famous polar-area chart, a completely new way of presenting data at the time, she captured a visual representation of the statistics that made them easy to understand. Improve the sanitary conditions in the hospitals, she explained, and many soldiers’ lives will be saved.”
“It became not so much “how do we fix this problem,” but “how do we stop it from happening in the first place.” She took the knowledge and experience she gained in the Crimea and began gathering statistics not just for British Army field hospitals, but for domestic ones as well. She demonstrated that unsanitary conditions in military hospitals were a real problem causing many preventable deaths.”
“Inversion shows us that we don’t always need to be geniuses, nor do we need to limit its application to mathematical and scientific proofs. Simply invert, always invert, when you are stuck. If you take the results of your inversion seriously, you might make a great deal of progress on solving your problems.”