A lot of people want to know how to succeed.

They want a detailed plan to achieve their goals and won’t take action until they’ve figured it all out. They badly want to know how to win.

This approach has two problems.

The first is that you won’t do anything unless you know exactly how to achieve your goal. Of course, inaction doesn’t move you anywhere. The second is that it’s too easy to overcomplicate the process of winning. Knowing exactly what to do to win at some things is pretty hard so you can find yourself adding unnecessary steps and overthinking everything.

There’s a far more effective approach called inversion thinking, which can be used for any problem.

Instead of figuring out how to win the game, figure out how to lose it. This may sound strange but think about this:

If you know how to lose, you know exactly how to win. You just need to do the opposite.

This solves both problems with the ‘figure out how to win‘ strategy. It gives you no excuses for not taking action. It also oversimplifies the process of making progress so you don’t get lost in your thoughts.

Thinking using inversion gives you an edge over most people, who never consider moving in the reverse direction.

Here are three simple steps to use inversion thinking in your life:

1 – Pick a goal you actually want to achieve.

Before using inversion, you have to pick a goal/problem. Sounds simple enough? Not really.

It would be a shame to waste your time breaking down a goal you don’t care about. The harsh possibility is that you might just be interested in your goal because society told you to or you want to impress others.

Make sure you aren’t playing the wrong game. It would be far better to lose the right game than to win the wrong one.

Spend time alone with yourself in a quiet room. Think about the goals you say you want to achieve and whether you really want them or society wants them for you. It will hurt to realise that you don’t actually care about some of your goals. It will hurt even more though if you spend your whole life never confronting the truth.

Imagine how it would feel to finally succeed at something after years of effort, and to realise it was never what you wanted all along!

That’s what we want to avoid here.

2 – Write down how you would fail.

This is the fun part.

Grab a notepad or open your favourite note-taking software (I like Obsidian). Write down all the things you would do to fail at your goal. I encourage you to be extreme and write down how you’d lose in the worst way possible.

If you want to be healthier, your list might read like this:

• Pull all-nighters
• Stay inside all day
• Avoid drinking water
• Scroll for 8 hours per day
• Only eat ultra-processed food
• Spend the whole day sitting down

Your list can be really simple. That’s actually the point.

If you want to be a better writer, your list might just be:

• Don’t write.

3 – Do the exact opposite.

Take that list. Do the exact opposite of what you wrote. That’s it.

Using the example earlier of becoming healthier, you would:

• Sleep
• Go outside
• Drink lots of water
• Use your phone less
• Eat more whole foods
• Move around and exercise

It seems simple. It’s supposed to be. Success doesn’t happen because of grand acts. It’s a result of doing the right things consistently, even if they’re basic, boring, and unbelievably simple.

Why inversion is so powerful

Inversion thinking is by no means groundbreaking.

What matters is that it does the job. It allows you to start tackling your goals and problems without overthinking everything, which slows down your progress.

In an earlier article, I wrote that we chase grand “hacks” to solve our problems and ignore the power of the small but mighty fixes that really do the heavy lifting.

Inversion is one of those small fixes.

A large chunk of success comes from not doing the wrong things.

Inversion allows you to figure out what those things are, so you can avoid doing them. Just by not doing the wrong things, you put yourself in a better position than if you try to find the perfect strategy to win.

Successful people didn’t have a grand plan to get to their position now. They didn’t win because they knew exactly how to win. They won because they learnt from their mistakes and avoided them.

Most of us already know how to destroy our lives anyways. We fall into bad habits. We give into self-destructive behaviour. You know the things that ruin your life and so you know how to improve it.

Don’t overcomplicate success. Just avoid doing the wrong things.