Mental Models: How the Inversion Principle Could Change Your Life
We’re often told to think things through, or to ponder and reflect on our thoughts. That might help to elevate our thought process, but there’s one key method that people usually miss out on.
Why should we stop at finding ways to think more about problems, when we can change the way we think about them instead?
This didn’t really occur to me until I started reading up on mental models. At its simplest, a mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process, or a theory on how different aspects of the world work. There are tons of different mental models out there, ranging from bribery to the theory of relativity.
Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway popularized the concept of mental models, and suggests using a “latticework of models”, with several dozens of them essential to finding success. While I won’t be giving you my take on all of the most popular ones, I’ll be providing a summary on the idea of inversion.
The origins of inversion come from a German mathematician named Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, and one of his mathematical theories translated to “Invert, always invert.” In the context of math, he meant for it to be used with elliptic functions, but his theory can also be interpreted as a way of approaching general problems, not limited just to functions. As with a multitude of other mental models, it was popularized by Charlie Munger.
In essence, it involves taking some type of question or issue that you have, and looking at it backwards, or inverting it. Your new goal shouldn’t be finding ways to be successful, it should be determining what things could prevent you from being successful. It should be far easier to prevent a bad outcome than to think of solutions to create a good outcome.
While inverting a problem doesn’t necessarily solve it, inversion can be one of the best ways to improve upon a product, service, or even your life in general.
To gain a better understanding of the inversion principle, let’s run through a simple example for it. Let’s say that you’re making an app, and it needs to be as user-friendly as possible. Instead of starting with wondering how to create a masterpiece of an app, you could invert the problem and change it to “How can I make an app as user-unfriendly as possible?”
It may seem unusual, but it often becomes much easier to think of answers to inverted questions. Part of the reason for this might be that as consumers, we’re far more likely to complain than compliment.
Going back to the example, let’s brainstorm some ways to make an app unfriendly to use.
Ideas to Make Sure No One Uses Your App
- Add in tons of buttons everywhere
- Make the app have a bad design in terms of font and logos
- Ensure that the app is unstable and buggy
- Add in tons of pointless animations
- Overload the user with information
Now, invert the responses, and you know exactly what NOT to do. By avoiding all of the faux-pas listed above, you’ll ideally be able to create a much better app than you would have by solely looking into the ways to improve what you already have.
Sure, that was a really simple example for a fairly straightforward problem. That was just an introduction to the inversion principle, but it’s well-suited towards working through more complex and open-ended problems.
So, when should you use inversion?
Based on Carl Jacobi’s quote, “Invert, always invert”, you have a fairly solid answer. However, when it comes down to it, you don’t really need inversion to choose which flavor of ice cream you want, and there are more practical times in which the practice is useful.
- Business: If you’re working to develop or optimize a product/service, there’s a high chance that you’ll be looking at ways to innovate or improve upon it. Sometimes, it can be extremely useful to look at it from an inverted perspective, and ask questions such as “What factors might consumers not enjoy?” instead of “What might consumers like?”
- General Life: Improving yourself as a person is one of the most difficult “problems” to solve as humans, and one issue that a lot of us face is lack of productivity. You can ask a question like “What causes someone to not be productive?”, and it can lead to follow-up questions in the realm of “How do I get distracted?”. Then, it’s possible to go even further and remove objects of distraction.
- Relationships: There are many ways to apply the inversion principle here, but the most obvious to me is instead of asking “How do I get people to like me?”, one should instead ask “What might make people not like me?” This backwards thinking method is probably much more effective than most methods that you’d initially think of when using a traditional forward approach.
How to Actually Implement Inversion
Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance, Taken directly from the Farnam Street blog
If we’re looking to implement changes to something, it’s usually most effective to use the inversion principle before thinking about how to innovate or revolutionize it. You can always worry about that after you optimize for the best current state of a product, service, or even yourself.
It’s pretty easy for me to sit here writing about this cool mental model called the inversion principle, but it’s about ten times harder to actually work on incorporating it into my daily life, or “latticework”, if you’d like to call it that. When it comes to using it in the real world, I’ve made a set of action items that anyone can try to put it into use:
- For the next 5 problems that you encounter, whether it’s related to planning for an event, writing an essay, or even approaching somebody, apply the inversion principle. It doesn’t matter how big or how small, just get into the practice of using it.
- After that, try using it on yourself. Take any personal goal or ambition that you’re currently striving for, and determine what things you’re doing which could put you farther away from the goal. Implement these changes, and it could be something as simple as realizing that it’s much easier and equally as effective to control your pizza intake in comparison to an intense workout. I’m not saying that workouts are bad, just that eating less pizza is significantly easier.
The ultimate goal of using a wide variety and quantity of mental models is to open up our thinking, and to allow us to solve an equally large range of problems. It allows for our knowledge to become more adaptable, and let’s us apply our knowledge more effectively. However, when it comes to inversion, instead of wondering how to solve problems, it might do us better to ask how not to solve them!
Thank you for reading my article! If you have any feedback, suggestions, comments, or corrections, I’d love to hear them. Feel free to contact me through any of the social media below.
E-mail: vedaant.varshney@gmail.com
LinkedIn: Vedaant Varshney
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