Super Thinking

1

Being Wrong Less

You may not realize it, but you make dozens of decisions every day. And when you make those decisions, whether they are personal or professional, you want to be right much more often than you are wrong. However, consistently being right more often is hard to do because the world is a complex, ever-­evolving place. You are steadily faced with unfamiliar situations, usually with a large array of choices. The right answer may be apparent only in hindsight, if it ever becomes clear at all.

Carl Jacobi was a nineteenth-­century German mathematician who often used to say, Invert, always invert (actually he said, Man muss immer umkehren, because English wasn t his first language). He meant that thinking about a problem from an inverse perspective can unlock new solutions and strategies. For example, most people approach investing their money from the perspective of making more money; the inverse approach would be investing money from the perspective of not losing money.

Or consider healthy eating. A direct approach would be to try to construct a healthy diet, perhaps by making more food at home with controlled ingredients. An inverse approach, by contrast, would be to try to avoid unhealthy options. You might still go to all the same eating establishment but simply choose the healthier options when there.

The problem of making good decisions can also benefit from this concept of inverse thinking. The inverse of being more right is being less wrong. Mental models are a tool set that can help you be less wrong. They are a collection of concepts that help you more effectively navigate our complex world.

As noted in the Introduction, mental models come from a variety of specific disciplines, but many have more value beyond the field they come from. If you can use these mental models to help you make decisions as events unfold before you, they can help you be wrong less often.

Let us offer an example from the world of sports. In tennis,

Gabriel Weinberg is the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company and private search engine. He holds a B.S. with honors from MIT in Physics and an M.S. from the MIT Technology and Policy Program. Weinberg is also the co-author of Traction.

Lauren McCann is a statistician and researcher. She spent nearly a decade at GlaxoSmithKline, where she designed and analyzed clinical trials and authored articles in medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine. She holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research and a B.S. with honors in mathematics, from MIT.

Lauren and Gabriel reside in Valley Forge, PA with their two children.

superthinking.com

An intellectual playground that will have your brain doing mental reps and seeing the world differently."
SHANE PARRISH, creator of the Farnam Street blog and host of The Knowledge Project podcast
 
An invaluable resource for making sense of the world, making good decisions, and placing smart bets. A fast-paced and fun read, jam-packed with useful information on every page. I wish I d had this book ages ago!
ANNIE DUKE, author of Thinking in Bets
 
"Internalizing these mental models will help you understand the world around you. Once you can spot them, you can change your own behavior to avoid common traps, adjust how you interact with people to get better results, and maybe even articulate new mental models of the world that have yet to be discovered."
BRIAN ARMSTRONG, Cofounder & CEO of Coinbase