Inversion
Instead of asking how to succeed, ask what would guarantee failure — then refuse to do those things.
“Invert, always invert,” urged the mathematician Carl Jacobi. Hard problems often crack open when you attack them backwards.
Avoiding stupidity is more tractable than manufacturing brilliance. The list of ways to sink a project is concrete, finite, and checkable — a list of ways to make it soar is neither.
Inversion also surfaces what forward planning glosses over. When you hunt for wreckage on purpose, risks stop hiding inside your optimism.
It works at any scale: a good life plan starts with what would make you miserable; a strong launch starts with what would make it flop.
Think in reverse
Define the disaster
Describe, vividly, the worst realistic outcome of the decision in front of you.
Work backward
List the choices and conditions that would lead straight to that disaster.
- What would a saboteur do?
- Which of these am I already doing?
Design them out
Change your plan so the failure paths are closed off before you commit — remove the choice, add the guardrail, name the tripwire.
Tell me where I'm going to die, so I don't go there.