Ep 91 | How to Leverage the Mental Model 'Inversion' to Make Decisions with Brian Gubernick

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off Podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into it. Today we're going to be talking about the mental model known as inversion. Inversion. So what is inversion? Inversion is a tool. It's a powerful tool that helps us improve our thinking because it helps us identify and remove obstacles to success. See, the root of the word inversion is invert, the word invert, which means to upend or turn something upside down. Rather than going forward, to back, we're going backward to front. So as a thinking tool, it means approaching a situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point. And that natural starting point, we have a tendency to think one way, and that one way is forward. So inversion allows us to flip the problem around and think backward. Sometimes it's good to start at the beginning, but sometimes it could be even more useful to start at the end. Here's a great example of that, something that I've talked about on the podcast many times as it pertains to life planning. When I talk about planning out your life, there's an exercise I discuss which is about writing your own eulogy. I encourage everybody as they're, as they're planning their life, as they're setting their life goals, as part of that exercise, we should all write our own eulogy. And what does that mean? It means literally, like, really Think around, what do you want those people at your celebration of life saying about you? What do you want your kids saying? What do you want your significant other saying? What are your friends, your closest friends, how are they describing you? What stories are they telling? Are they laughing? Are they crying? I want you to employ all 5 senses. I want you to write this eulogy. Now, I use this as an example because what is that? Well, that's starting with the end in mind. In other words, if you write your eulogy and then work backwards to today, then starting today you can in fact take actions that align with the way that you want to be remembered years and years and years and years from now. So we are reverse engineering the life we want to lead. Most of us will set goals forward-facing. Here's a goal I have for 5 years or 10 years or over the rest of my life. And that's great, but I'm also challenging you to invert that and start with the end in mind and work backwards to today. So if we're going to apply, apply inversion, instead of aiming directly for your goal, think deeply maybe about what you want to avoid and then see what options are left over. What an interesting way to think through a problem. So instead of aiming directly for the goal, which is our tendency, why don't you also, in addition to thinking about goals, think deeply about what you want to avoid and see what options are left? Instead of thinking through the achievement of a positive outcome, you could ask yourself how you might achieve a terrible outcome and let that guide your decision-making. So a good example here, Vanguard. Many of us are familiar with the financial company Vanguard, and Vanguard is most well known for the index fund concept. The gentleman that ran, started Vanguard, built Vanguard to prominence, more or less invented the index fund. And what was the index fund? It was a fund that would mirror some sort of index like the S&P 500. And the fund was created by, instead of asking, how do we beat the market, which is what everybody else was doing, the company started asking, how can we help investors minimize losses? How do they minimize fees? And how do they minimize poor money manager selection? And the answer to that was in fact the index fund. Index funds operate on the fact that Accruing wealth has a lot more to do with minimizing loss than anything else. And so what are index funds? They're relatively inexpensive and they don't require expensive money managers. So the fees are low and the money manager selection is minimal. There isn't even really one to have in place because we're mirroring an index. That was reverse engineering a fund, which was very different than everybody else around, than every other example around them. There's some other examples. Say you want to improve innovation in your organization. So if we're looking forward, if we're thinking forward, you think about all of the things that maybe you can do within your company to foster innovation. Maybe it's contests, maybe it's grants, maybe it's giving time to think. But I mean, there's so many different ideas around how to create more innovation. But if you look at the problem By inversion, you'd start to think about all the things you could do that would discourage innovation. And then ideally, you'd avoid those things. So it sounds pretty simple. But I bet that your team, your business, your organization does some of those stupid things today. Like if you think about innovation, uh, or you think about all of the things that would discourage innovation, my guess, that is as simple as it sounds, when you go through that list, you're probably doing some of those things. Another great example: rather than thinking about what makes for a great life, think about what prescriptions would ensure misery, misery, and then avoid those things. This is reverse engineering. This is inversion. So the focusing question for you today, whatever it is that you're working on, whatever it is that you're, you're looking out into the future and planning for, be it goal setting or strategizing or whatever it may be, as you work through that today or this week, what I'd love to see you do is not just go through that standard process that you're accustomed to, but I want you to invert it. And I want you to, I want you to more or less turn it upside down and look at it from the other direction. If you're looking to achieve a positive outcome, Maybe ask yourself, what would guarantee a negative outcome? If you're looking to produce greater revenue, maybe ask yourself, what would guarantee lesser revenue? All I'm saying is improving your thinking by identifying and removing more obstacles on the path to success, and you're doing that by reverse engineering, by looking at things from the, from the back to the forward versus from the forward to the back? Take some time, give this some consideration, and I think you might come away with some even better decisions, some better results, a better path. That's all we have for today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.