最实用的思维模式：逆向思维-The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You
逆向思考是一项很重要技能，不仅在投资中起很重要的作用，在生活工作的方方面面都有体现，本文中文摘自36氪神译局的Jane，英文原版已经附在中文之下，建议英文好的朋友看原文更能体会作者的表达。
编者按：“逆向思维”是一种强大的心理模型，可以帮助我们更好地解决问题。本文来自编译，希望对您有所启发。
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问题，以及提问的方式，可以完全改变我们看待问题的方式。
你可以利用这一点来提高自己的思维和决策能力。这就是“逆向思维”作为一种思维模式的由来。
简单地说，心理模型代表了一个人的思维过程，它塑造了你思考、处理问题和识别重要信息的方式。
最终，学习心理模型的意义在于，你可以将它作为思维框架来帮助自己做出更好的决定：
暂停一下，避免过早下结论
了解扭曲你思维的心理偏见
避免假设，关注事实，提出更好的想法
世界上有数百种来自各个学科的思维模式，但对我来说，我发现“逆向思维”是最实用的。
1. 一个人必须学会逆向思考。
作为一种心理模型，逆向思维的真正形成要归功于 19 世纪德国著名的数学家卡尔·雅可比（Carl Jacobi）。这位德国数学家以能够解决特别困难和棘手的问题而闻名。
那么，他是如何做到的呢？
“Man muss immer umkehren.”
翻译过来就是：“人必须学会逆向思考，永远逆向思考。”
当雅可比被一道具有挑战性的数学题难住时，他经常使用这种策略。他不会持续以同样的方式（正向）看待问题，而是会以相反的方式（逆向）重新思考它。这种新的、创造性的观点往往能让他更加容易地解决问题。
“逆向思维”是指把一个假设或问题颠倒过来，反向思考：“如果事实正好相反呢？”
与其问做什么，不如问不做什么。
这是一个强大的工具，能够训练你的思维动态地思考。通过将重点放在乍一看不明显的错误和障碍上，你可以主动地想出解决方案。
2. 4种实践“逆向思维”的方法
“逆向思维”的美妙之处在于它的应用很广泛，既专业化又个性化。
这个过程并不总是需要花费太多的脑力或时间。有时候当你要做决定的时候，在头脑中快速地反转情况就足够了。
但是，还是让我们实际一点，谈谈如何在你的生活中应用它。
1. 进行失败预分析。
Twitter 和 Square 的创始人杰克•多尔西（Jack Dorsey）向风投投资者展示了一个名为《Square 失败的 140 个原因》（140 Reasons Why Square Will Fail）的幻灯片。
接着，他否定了这 140 个原因出现的可能性，并给出了理由。这就是一个逆向思维的过程：我的提议可能会有什么反对意见？我该如何从一开始就反击他们？
回答“是”的最快方法是，解决所有他们可能说“不”的原因。
类似的情况也存在于企业界。与其做事后审查，不如进行一个事前会议。和你的同事或客户坐下来，讨论你正在为之努力的最重要的目标或项目。然后，快进 6 个月，想象项目或目标失败了。
到底是哪里出了错？你犯了什么错误？它是如何失败的？
换句话说，想想你的主要目标，然后问自己：“什么会导致事情变得如此糟糕？”。列出你所面临的挑战，并根据失败点做出应对计划。
你也可以很容易地将逆向思维应用到个人生活中。
比如说你给自己设定了一个雄心勃勃的目标。想清楚什么会导致失败。是时间不够吗？目标定得太高？缺乏某些技能？缺钱？你能做些什么准备呢？
我准备几个月后去休假。为了让假期过好，我在想有什么原因会导致假期失败，举几个例子：
不关注自己想从休假中得到什么
每天大部分时间都在阅读，而没有明确的目标和行动
被那些感觉效率很高，但却没有实质性进展的小任务困住
关注和阅读太多资料，“计划”多于“行动”
我现在正在思考自己能做些什么，来确保这些事情不会发生。
2. 不要想着如何赢，而要想着如何避免输。
避免愚蠢比追求聪明更容易。
沃伦·巴菲特的商业伙伴、亿万富翁查理·芒格就以这句话的哲学而闻名。
如果你想要赢得一场网球比赛，那么获胜的策略就是避免犯错。避免错误的方法是保守，保持主动权，让对方有足够的空间来犯错误，因为作为一个业余的人，他会玩一场注定失败的游戏而不自知。
我们应该避免失败，而不是努力去赢。
很多时候，人们关注的是如何取得成功。但是，更好的方法是考虑成功的反面。
想想你不想过什么样的生活，不想成为什么样的人，并确保你尽一切努力避免这种情况的发生。
对你来说，普通或悲惨的生活是什么样子的？反过来，做相反的事。
写下那些你不喜欢的人的性格特征，让自己不要成为那样的人。
你是否还有一些想要超越的领域，但还没有改掉自己的坏习惯？有时候，成功不是关乎养成好习惯的，而是关乎避免坏习惯的。
试一试，这种思维练习能让你的思路更加清晰。
3. 问自己一个简单的问题。
对很多人来说，消极偏见驱使我们从“行不通”的角度来看待挑战。
当我们在面对一个问题时，我们倾向于认为它将是多么的复杂和耗时，于是变得焦虑，甚至在尝试之前就想放弃。
在这种情况下，你可以问自己一个很好的问题：
“如果这是一个很简单的问题会怎样？”
“太复杂、累人、冗长、不可能”的相反面是什么？
假设你要做的事情其实很简单，这个过程是怎样的？你需要什么来开始？你想要什么？
我注意到，简单地问自己这个问题，可以阻止我过度思考和让事情变得过度复杂。它提醒我不要把事情看得那么严重，打开音乐，喝杯咖啡，开始行动就好了。
4. 有时候，我们需要“反目标”而行之。
有时候，当我们过于专注自己的目标时，会无意中损害生活中的其他方面。
有一位“反目标”（Anti-Goals）的支持者陕普里（Shaan Puri）举了这样一个例子：
你的梦想是成为一名音乐家，你猜怎么着，你真的实现了梦想！但是当你环游世界的时候，你变胖了，染上了毒瘾，婚姻一团糟，孩子不认识你……你赢得了梦想，却输掉了生活。
建立目标后，你需要逆向思考一下：什么是你不希望发生的，无论是最终结果还是在过程中？
在你追求目标的过程中，最坏的结果可能是什么？什么系统或行为会导致这种情况？你现在能做些什么来避免这种情况发生呢？
总结
“逆向思维”是一种非常实用的思维模式和思维工具，你可以在工作和个人生活中使用它。
简单地说，“逆向思维”就是把假设或问题颠倒过来，逆向思考：“如果事实正好相反呢？”
在日常生活中应用这一技巧的 4 种方法：
1.对失败进行事前分析
2.我们应该避免失败，而不是努力去赢
3.问自己一个简单的问题：“如果这很容易呢？”
4.有时候，我们需要“反目标”而行之
译者：Jane
The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You
James Clear_Medium
The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a “premeditation of evils.” [1]
The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their job and become homeless or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed or to have their reputation ruined and lose their status in society.
The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them. While most people were focused on how they could achieve success, the Stoics also considered how they would manage failure. What would things look like if everything went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about how we should prepare today?
This way of thinking, in which you consider the opposite of what you want, is known as inversion. When I first learned of it, I didn’t realize how powerful it could be. As I have studied it more, I have begun to realize that inversion is a rare and crucial skill that nearly all great thinkers use to their advantage. [2]
How Great Thinkers Shatter the Status Quo
The German mathematician Carl Jacobi made a number of important contributions to different scientific fields during his career. In particular, he was 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 was to restate math problems in inverse form. He would write down the opposite of the problem he was trying to solve and found that the solution often came to him more easily.
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 do something, ask how to not do it.
Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forward and backward. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse.
Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forward and backward. They consider the opposite side of things. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse. This way of thinking can reveal compelling opportunities for innovation.
Art provides a good example.
One of the biggest musical shifts in the last several decades came from Nirvana, a band that legitimized a whole new genre of music — alternative rock — and whose Nevermind album is memorialized in the Library of Congress as one of the most “culturally, historically or aesthetically important” sound recordings of the 20th century. [4]
Nirvana turned the conventions of mainstream rock and pop music completely upside down. Where hair metal bands like Poison and Def Leppard spent millions to produce and promote each record, Nirvana recorded Nevermind for $65,000. Where hair metal was flashy, Nirvana was stripped-down and raw. [5]
Inversion is often at the core of great art. At any given time there is a status quo in society and the artists and innovators who stand out are often the ones who overturn the standard in a compelling way.
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 creative pursuits like writing. Many great headlines and titles use the power of inversion to up-end common assumptions. As a personal example, two of my more popular articles, “Forget About Setting Goals” and “Motivation is Overvalued”, take common notions and turn them on their head.
Success is Overvalued. Avoiding Failure Matters More.
This type of inverse logic can be extended to many areas of life. For example, ambitious young people are often focused on how to achieve success. But 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. If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are. You’re going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.” [6]
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 in life than why they succeed.
The Benefits of Thinking Forward and Backward
Inversion can be particularly useful in the workplace.
Leaders can ask themselves, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible manager?” Good leaders would likely avoid those things.
Similarly, if innovation is a core piece of your business model you can ask, “How could we make this company less innovative?” Eliminating those barriers and obstacles might help creative ideas arise more quickly.
And every marketing department wants to attract new business, but it might be useful to ask, “What would alienate our core customer?” A different point of view can reveal surprising insights.
You can learn just as much from identifying what doesn’t work as you can from spotting what does. What are the mistakes, errors, and flubs that you want to avoid? Inversion is not about finding good advice, but rather about finding anti-advice. It teaches you what to avoid.
Here are some more ways to utilize inversion in work and life:
Project Management
One of my favorite applications of inversion is known as a Failure Premortem. It is like a Premeditation of Evils for the modern day company. [7]
It works like this:
Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Now fast forward six months and assume the project or goal has failed.
Tell the story of how it happened. What went wrong? What mistakes did you make? How did it fail? In other words, think of your main goal and ask yourself, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?”
This strategy is sometimes called the “kill the company” exercise in organizations because the goal is to spell out the exact ways the company could fail. 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.
Productivity
Most people want to get more done in less time. 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.
This strategy is not only effective, but often safer than chasing success. For example, some people take drugs or mental stimulants in an effort to increase their productivity. These methods might work, but you also run the risk of possible side effects.
Meanwhile, there is very little danger is leaving your phone in another room, blocking social media websites, or unplugging your television. Both strategies deal with the same problem, but inversion allows you to attack it from a different angle and with less risk.
This insight reveals a more general principle: Blindly chasing success can have severe consequences, but preventing failure usually carries very little risk.
Decluttering
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 keep, not what we want to get rid of.”
In other words, the default should be to give anything away that does not “spark joy” in your life. This shift in mindset inverts decluttering by focusing on what you want to keep rather than what you want to discard.
Relationships
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 habits. Inverting a good marriage can show you how to avoid a bad one.
Personal Finance
Everyone wants to make more money. But what if you inverted the problem? How could you destroy your financial health?
Spending more than you earn is a proven path to financial failure. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, the math will never work out for you over time. Similarly, accumulating debt is a hair-on-fire emergency to be resolved as quickly as possible. And gradually creeping into unchecked shopping and spending habits can lead to self-inflicted financial stress.
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 anguish along the way.
Consider the Opposite
Inversion is counterintuitive. It is not obvious to spend time thinking about the opposite of what you want.
And yet inversion is a key tool of many great thinkers. Stoic practitioners visualize negative outcomes. Groundbreaking artists invert the status quo. Effective leaders avoid the mistakes that prevent success just as much as they chase the skills that accelerate it.
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 if the evidence disconfirmed what you believe? What if you tried to destroy the views that you cherish? Inversion prevents you from making up your mind after your first conclusion. It is a way to counteract the gravitational pull of confirmation bias.
Inversion is an essential skill for leading a logical and rational life. It allows you to step outside your normal patterns of thought and see situations from a different angle. Whatever problem you are facing, always consider the opposite side of things.
James Clear
is the author of Atomic Habits. He shares self-improvement tips based on proven scientific research. You can read his best articles or join his free newsletter to learn how to build habits that stick.
This article was originally published on JamesClear.com.
FOOTNOTES
Hat tip to Ryan Holiday. I learned about the “premeditatio malorum” in his article, Practice the Stoic Art of Negative Visualization. His books on Stoicism are great as well. I recommend starting with The Obstacle is the Way.
Inversion is different than working backward or “beginning with the end in mind.” Those strategies keep the same goal and approach it from a different direction. Meanwhile, inversion asks you to consider the opposite of your desired result.
A variety of math textbooks claim that “invert, always invert” was one of Jacobi’s favorite phrases. The oldest source I could find was the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 23. 1917.
10 years later, Cobain lives on in his music, TODAY. Also, see For The Record: Quick News On Gwen Stefani, Pharrell Williams, Ciara, ‘Dimebag’ Darrell, Nirvana, Shins & More, MTV.
Sandford 1995, p. 181
USC Law Commencement Speech by Charlie Munger. May 2007.
The term “Failure Premortem” was coined by psychologist Gary Klein in 2007.
