最實(shí)用的思維模式：逆向思維-The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You
逆向思考是一項(xiàng)很重要技能，不僅在投資中起很重要的作用，在生活工作的方方面面都有體現(xiàn)，本文中文摘自36氪神譯局的Jane，英文原版已經(jīng)附在中文之下，建議英文好的朋友看原文更能體會(huì)作者的表達(dá)。
編者按：“逆向思維”是一種強(qiáng)大的心理模型，可以幫助我們更好地解決問(wèn)題。本文來(lái)自編譯，希望對(duì)您有所啟發(fā)。
圖片來(lái)源：Medium
問(wèn)題，以及提問(wèn)的方式，可以完全改變我們看待問(wèn)題的方式。
你可以利用這一點(diǎn)來(lái)提高自己的思維和決策能力。這就是“逆向思維”作為一種思維模式的由來(lái)。
簡(jiǎn)單地說(shuō)，心理模型代表了一個(gè)人的思維過(guò)程，它塑造了你思考、處理問(wèn)題和識(shí)別重要信息的方式。
最終，學(xué)習(xí)心理模型的意義在于，你可以將它作為思維框架來(lái)幫助自己做出更好的決定：
暫停一下，避免過(guò)早下結(jié)論
了解扭曲你思維的心理偏見(jiàn)
避免假設(shè)，關(guān)注事實(shí)，提出更好的想法
世界上有數(shù)百種來(lái)自各個(gè)學(xué)科的思維模式，但對(duì)我來(lái)說(shuō)，我發(fā)現(xiàn)“逆向思維”是最實(shí)用的。
1. 一個(gè)人必須學(xué)會(huì)逆向思考。
作為一種心理模型，逆向思維的真正形成要?dú)w功于 19 世紀(jì)德國(guó)著名的數(shù)學(xué)家卡爾·雅可比（Carl Jacobi）。這位德國(guó)數(shù)學(xué)家以能夠解決特別困難和棘手的問(wèn)題而聞名。
那么，他是如何做到的呢？
“Man muss immer umkehren.”
翻譯過(guò)來(lái)就是：“人必須學(xué)會(huì)逆向思考，永遠(yuǎn)逆向思考?！?/p>
當(dāng)雅可比被一道具有挑戰(zhàn)性的數(shù)學(xué)題難住時(shí)，他經(jīng)常使用這種策略。他不會(huì)持續(xù)以同樣的方式（正向）看待問(wèn)題，而是會(huì)以相反的方式（逆向）重新思考它。這種新的、創(chuàng)造性的觀點(diǎn)往往能讓他更加容易地解決問(wèn)題。
“逆向思維”是指把一個(gè)假設(shè)或問(wèn)題顛倒過(guò)來(lái)，反向思考：“如果事實(shí)正好相反呢？”
與其問(wèn)做什么，不如問(wèn)不做什么。
這是一個(gè)強(qiáng)大的工具，能夠訓(xùn)練你的思維動(dòng)態(tài)地思考。通過(guò)將重點(diǎn)放在乍一看不明顯的錯(cuò)誤和障礙上，你可以主動(dòng)地想出解決方案。
2. 4種實(shí)踐“逆向思維”的方法
“逆向思維”的美妙之處在于它的應(yīng)用很廣泛，既專業(yè)化又個(gè)性化。
這個(gè)過(guò)程并不總是需要花費(fèi)太多的腦力或時(shí)間。有時(shí)候當(dāng)你要做決定的時(shí)候，在頭腦中快速地反轉(zhuǎn)情況就足夠了。
但是，還是讓我們實(shí)際一點(diǎn)，談?wù)勅绾卧谀愕纳钪袘?yīng)用它。
1. 進(jìn)行失敗預(yù)分析。
Twitter 和 Square 的創(chuàng)始人杰克?多爾西（Jack Dorsey）向風(fēng)投投資者展示了一個(gè)名為《Square 失敗的 140 個(gè)原因》（140 Reasons Why Square Will Fail）的幻燈片。
接著，他否定了這 140 個(gè)原因出現(xiàn)的可能性，并給出了理由。這就是一個(gè)逆向思維的過(guò)程：我的提議可能會(huì)有什么反對(duì)意見(jiàn)？我該如何從一開(kāi)始就反擊他們？
回答“是”的最快方法是，解決所有他們可能說(shuō)“不”的原因。
類似的情況也存在于企業(yè)界。與其做事后審查，不如進(jìn)行一個(gè)事前會(huì)議。和你的同事或客戶坐下來(lái)，討論你正在為之努力的最重要的目標(biāo)或項(xiàng)目。然后，快進(jìn) 6 個(gè)月，想象項(xiàng)目或目標(biāo)失敗了。
到底是哪里出了錯(cuò)？你犯了什么錯(cuò)誤？它是如何失敗的？
換句話說(shuō)，想想你的主要目標(biāo)，然后問(wèn)自己：“什么會(huì)導(dǎo)致事情變得如此糟糕？”。列出你所面臨的挑戰(zhàn)，并根據(jù)失敗點(diǎn)做出應(yīng)對(duì)計(jì)劃。
你也可以很容易地將逆向思維應(yīng)用到個(gè)人生活中。
比如說(shuō)你給自己設(shè)定了一個(gè)雄心勃勃的目標(biāo)。想清楚什么會(huì)導(dǎo)致失敗。是時(shí)間不夠嗎？目標(biāo)定得太高？缺乏某些技能？缺錢？你能做些什么準(zhǔn)備呢？
我準(zhǔn)備幾個(gè)月后去休假。為了讓假期過(guò)好，我在想有什么原因會(huì)導(dǎo)致假期失敗，舉幾個(gè)例子：
不關(guān)注自己想從休假中得到什么
每天大部分時(shí)間都在閱讀，而沒(méi)有明確的目標(biāo)和行動(dòng)
被那些感覺(jué)效率很高，但卻沒(méi)有實(shí)質(zhì)性進(jìn)展的小任務(wù)困住
關(guān)注和閱讀太多資料，“計(jì)劃”多于“行動(dòng)”
我現(xiàn)在正在思考自己能做些什么，來(lái)確保這些事情不會(huì)發(fā)生。
2. 不要想著如何贏，而要想著如何避免輸。
避免愚蠢比追求聰明更容易。
沃倫·巴菲特的商業(yè)伙伴、億萬(wàn)富翁查理·芒格就以這句話的哲學(xué)而聞名。
如果你想要贏得一場(chǎng)網(wǎng)球比賽，那么獲勝的策略就是避免犯錯(cuò)。避免錯(cuò)誤的方法是保守，保持主動(dòng)權(quán)，讓對(duì)方有足夠的空間來(lái)犯錯(cuò)誤，因?yàn)樽鳛橐粋€(gè)業(yè)余的人，他會(huì)玩一場(chǎng)注定失敗的游戲而不自知。
我們應(yīng)該避免失敗，而不是努力去贏。
很多時(shí)候，人們關(guān)注的是如何取得成功。但是，更好的方法是考慮成功的反面。
想想你不想過(guò)什么樣的生活，不想成為什么樣的人，并確保你盡一切努力避免這種情況的發(fā)生。
對(duì)你來(lái)說(shuō)，普通或悲慘的生活是什么樣子的？反過(guò)來(lái)，做相反的事。
寫下那些你不喜歡的人的性格特征，讓自己不要成為那樣的人。
你是否還有一些想要超越的領(lǐng)域，但還沒(méi)有改掉自己的壞習(xí)慣？有時(shí)候，成功不是關(guān)乎養(yǎng)成好習(xí)慣的，而是關(guān)乎避免壞習(xí)慣的。
試一試，這種思維練習(xí)能讓你的思路更加清晰。
3. 問(wèn)自己一個(gè)簡(jiǎn)單的問(wèn)題。
對(duì)很多人來(lái)說(shuō)，消極偏見(jiàn)驅(qū)使我們從“行不通”的角度來(lái)看待挑戰(zhàn)。
當(dāng)我們?cè)诿鎸?duì)一個(gè)問(wèn)題時(shí)，我們傾向于認(rèn)為它將是多么的復(fù)雜和耗時(shí)，于是變得焦慮，甚至在嘗試之前就想放棄。
在這種情況下，你可以問(wèn)自己一個(gè)很好的問(wèn)題：
“如果這是一個(gè)很簡(jiǎn)單的問(wèn)題會(huì)怎樣？”
“太復(fù)雜、累人、冗長(zhǎng)、不可能”的相反面是什么？
假設(shè)你要做的事情其實(shí)很簡(jiǎn)單，這個(gè)過(guò)程是怎樣的？你需要什么來(lái)開(kāi)始？你想要什么？
我注意到，簡(jiǎn)單地問(wèn)自己這個(gè)問(wèn)題，可以阻止我過(guò)度思考和讓事情變得過(guò)度復(fù)雜。它提醒我不要把事情看得那么嚴(yán)重，打開(kāi)音樂(lè)，喝杯咖啡，開(kāi)始行動(dòng)就好了。
4. 有時(shí)候，我們需要“反目標(biāo)”而行之。
有時(shí)候，當(dāng)我們過(guò)于專注自己的目標(biāo)時(shí)，會(huì)無(wú)意中損害生活中的其他方面。
有一位“反目標(biāo)”（Anti-Goals）的支持者陜普里（Shaan Puri）舉了這樣一個(gè)例子：
你的夢(mèng)想是成為一名音樂(lè)家，你猜怎么著，你真的實(shí)現(xiàn)了夢(mèng)想！但是當(dāng)你環(huán)游世界的時(shí)候，你變胖了，染上了毒癮，婚姻一團(tuán)糟，孩子不認(rèn)識(shí)你……你贏得了夢(mèng)想，卻輸?shù)袅松睢?/p>
建立目標(biāo)后，你需要逆向思考一下：什么是你不希望發(fā)生的，無(wú)論是最終結(jié)果還是在過(guò)程中？
在你追求目標(biāo)的過(guò)程中，最壞的結(jié)果可能是什么？什么系統(tǒng)或行為會(huì)導(dǎo)致這種情況？你現(xiàn)在能做些什么來(lái)避免這種情況發(fā)生呢？
總結(jié)
“逆向思維”是一種非常實(shí)用的思維模式和思維工具，你可以在工作和個(gè)人生活中使用它。
簡(jiǎn)單地說(shuō)，“逆向思維”就是把假設(shè)或問(wèn)題顛倒過(guò)來(lái)，逆向思考：“如果事實(shí)正好相反呢？”
在日常生活中應(yīng)用這一技巧的 4 種方法：
1.對(duì)失敗進(jìn)行事前分析
2.我們應(yīng)該避免失敗，而不是努力去贏
3.問(wèn)自己一個(gè)簡(jiǎn)單的問(wèn)題：“如果這很容易呢？”
4.有時(shí)候，我們需要“反目標(biāo)”而行之
譯者：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.
