The Power of Negative Thinking: Supercharge your Decision-Making Skill
Maya Angelou, a well-known poet and civil rights activist, once wrote:
“Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between”
“Prepared for the worst” is a useful mindset to have in decision—making.
I really liked Angelou’s text and I am going to relate it something wrote in chapter 8 of her book¹, titled “The Power of Negative Thinking”
You may assume thinking negatively is a bad idea. We should always think positively.
As the best-selling book “The Power of Positive Thinking”² says, we absorb what we think. If we think positively, we absorb positive results.
Well, there is a caveat here. It is important to distinguish the following:
“ You need to think positively about the destination (goal) but think negatively about the route.”
Thinking negatively here means: that for every goal/ decision you want to make, imagine “all the ways that you can fail” to achieve that goal.
Why Only “Positive Thinking” is Not Enough
Let me give an example.
Your goal is to lose 10 kg weight in 2024. That is a positive goal, and you should definitely have such a positive goal and thinking.
But, now imagine all the ways that “You can fail to achieve this goal”:
- You start eating healthier food, but then after a while, start snacking after dinner
- You started a gym membership but, after a while, stopped it due to being busy with work
Surprisingly, research shows that thinking about “What Can Go Wrong in Our Plans” actually helps us to realize our goals easier.
So “Only Positively Thinking” about our goal of “losing 10kg” is not enough.
It is not surprising that within a week, 23% of every New Year resolution is abandoned, and 90% are never achieved.
What is Negative Thinking
The “Negative Thinking” is a powerful technique that I personally found can be very helpful in life.
It is a mental contrast:
“You’d think positively about what your future is, but you think back all the way that you can not reach that future and see what all the obstacles are now”
Now, you can ask what the roots of this failure are. It is about two ways that
- Our Choices
- Bad luck
Now, having figured out all the obstacles in the path, it is three essential benefits for achieving your goal:
How “Negative Thinking” will Help you Achieve your Goals Easier:
1) Pre-Commitment Barrier
Think about the reasons you fail to achieve your goal. Then, make a “pre-commitment” barrier that will prevent you from having that bad outcome.
For example, imagine you get a new job, and one thing you think will be an obstacle to doing your job is your relationship with your boss.
What you can to imagine in this possible scenario is to do all the precommitments you make to avoid it:
- Have clear communication with your boss from the beginning
- Setting expectations in the beginning
So, the pre-commitment barrier works in two ways.
First, you raise the barriers to behavior/decisions that interface with your goal and encourage behavior that supports your success, all planned in advance.
2) Avoiding Surprise
Our brain is not immune from a hot emotional state when dealing with bad outcomes.
When a bad outcome happens, it is much more likely that it will affect the quality of your decision-making.
What-the-hell effect:
Our decision-making can be compromised when we face a bad situation.
Imagine you decided to eat healthily. You are following your decision until one day, in the breakroom at your job, you see a couple of donuts. You just pick a couple of them. Then, following that day, you load up yourself with junk food, thinking you will start again the next day. next week…
This is the classical “What-the-hell-effect,” where one worse situation compromises your decision quality and affects all of your decisions.
Thinking negatively in advance and recognizing all the ways we fail in advance help us to be “better prepared” to react rationally and avoid situations like “What the hell effect?”
Thinking Negatively about the Obstacles due to our Bad Luck:
The outcome of your decision is not only influenced by your choices. It is influenced by luck, also.
You can think in advance about all the obstacles to the decision that can happen due to bad luck.
Let’s say you have always dreamed of having an outdoor wedding. And finally, you reserved the beautiful garden for your wedding.
Well, one problem in achieving your desired result can be the wedding day being rainy. It is just possible due to bad luck, out of our control.
Now, how does the Power of Negative Thinking help here? Well, knowing what can go wrong, you can start “Hedging” about your decisions in your life.
“Hedging”
Hedging is simply making/generating an option that you hope you will never use.
You only use it to mitigate the impact of big downsides in your decisions.
In the case of weddings in the garden, rain is a big downside. What option you make that you hope that you never use it but it mitigate the impact of rain?
Maybe renting and setting up a tent, in this case, maybe good hedging.
Main Take Aways:
- Positive Thinking is good for thinking about a “Destination”, but Negative Thinking is a much better approach for planning the “Route” to get there.
- Research shows that “Negative” thinking about all the obstacles in your way to achieving your goals makes you find 30% more obstacles.
- Finding more obstacles in the route to the destination “in advance” is a little of mental pain. But, mental pain leads to real-world gains.
- How thinking negatively about the route actually helps you achieve your goals:
A) It will force you to think about obstacles and figure out what steps you can take to avoid them
B) Avoid surprises when bad outcomes happen, avoiding being in a “hot” emotional state.
6. Thinking about obstacles on the route to your goal helps you address potential bad luck by hedging: paying for something mitigates the impact of unwanted outcomes.
[1]: How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, 2020, Annie Duke
[2]: The Power of Positive Thinking, 2003, Norman Vincent Peale,
