Sometimes the fastest way to find the right answer is to ask the inverted question on purpose.
That’s the core of inversion, a common mental model: instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to fail. And then don’t do those things.
It sounds simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy. People are used to chasing outcomes. They’re much less practiced at avoiding traps. Especially the ones that don’t look like traps at first.
If you ask “how do I stay healthy,” you’ll get a hundred vague suggestions. Exercise, sleep, eat well, whatever that means. But if you ask “what makes people unhealthy,” the answers come fast. Smoking. Sitting all day. Sugar. Avoiding those won’t guarantee success but it rules out obvious failure paths. That gets you further than most people realize.
Avoiding stupidity is often smarter than trying to be brilliant.
Wrong Questions
It’s easy to misuse inversion by framing the wrong question.
For example, if you want to be more confident, you might ask “what makes people anxious?” That’s a good start. But if you ask “what makes people quiet,” you might miss the point entirely. Quietness isn’t the same as anxiety.
Misframing the question breaks the model.
The goal of inversion is to remove the obstacles that prevent a good outcome. Inversion works when the question targets what blocks the desired outcome, not just its opposite.
Patterns are Sticky
What’s surprising is how consistent the bad stuff are.
Bad health habits are pretty much the same for everyone. Same with poor spending decisions. Same with cybersecurity issues. Same with bad hires.
The bad is predictable. It repeats.
And that makes it fixable.
If you know what patterns lead to trouble, you can build guardrails around them. Then you don’t need to obsess over best practices. Just steer away from the worst ones.
A Scale of Negatives
Another way to use inversion is with a scale. Instead of listing “best practices,” list the worst. The things that almost always go wrong.
This works because many small mistakes pile up. Inversion forces you to identify those.
If you know what not to do, what remains is often good enough.
The Point
Inversion won’t give you the answer. But it’ll keep you from walking into the obvious walls.