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"Invert, always invert." Join this challenge to gain new insights on how to achieve your WIP goal :)
I recently finished reading Poor Charlie's Almanack, which is a collection of Charlie Munger's talks.
One of his most well known phrases is "Invert, always invert." which is a technique to come up with non-obvious insights when working on a goal.
For example, if you goal is to decrease churn, you can "invert" the goal by asking "How can we INCREASE churn?" and then AVOID doing just that.
By inverting the question, you will look at the problem in a new way that can lead to new insights.
The best way to learn is to put things into practice. So I wanted to invite you to do it with me. Here's how:
1. State a current goal for one of your projects
2. State the the inverse of that goal
3. Answer this: How can you achieve that inverted goal?
4. What does this mean for your actual goal?
One of his most well known phrases is "Invert, always invert." which is a technique to come up with non-obvious insights when working on a goal.
For example, if you goal is to decrease churn, you can "invert" the goal by asking "How can we INCREASE churn?" and then AVOID doing just that.
By inverting the question, you will look at the problem in a new way that can lead to new insights.
The best way to learn is to put things into practice. So I wanted to invite you to do it with me. Here's how:
1. State a current goal for one of your projects
2. State the the inverse of that goal
3. Answer this: How can you achieve that inverted goal?
4. What does this mean for your actual goal?
👋 Join WIP to participate
Seems like it's time to get to work, interesting exercise 💪
That sounds fun. I will give it a try,
Goal: Do marketing & test ideas to reach 10,000 users
Invert goal: Don't do any marketing or try any new ideas.
Achieve inverted goal: Just sit around and wait for the users to come.
Achieve actual goal: Don't just sit around and wait for the users to come, proactively try new initiatives, ideas and marketing techniques.
Goal: Earn my first dollar with an online project.
Inverted Goal: Earn no money with online projects.
Achieve the Inverted Goal (from experience):
Start a new project, and when it's 80% done, switch to a new, "better" idea. Alternatively, finish the project, submit a "Show HN" post, realize I have no idea how to achieve distribution, and repeat.
Achieve the Actual Goal:
Start a new project only when I have a plan for distribution and monetization.
Cut the scope so I can finish it before I start losing motivation or find a new shiny idea.
I do this exercise a lot in workshops (but we call it "reverse engineering") and it always, always creates lots of fun and exceptional ideas. It's really excellent for getting out of the box thinking of marketing and recruitment too. Thank you for doing this!
Goal : get 5,000 MORE streams and 100+ more saves/adds in June for the guitarist
Inverted goal : get no new saves and streams in June
Achieve inverted goal: don't release a new song, don't contact playlist owners, don't email any media, no social posts - just do nothing
Achieve actual goal: release new song, contact as many relevant playlist owners as I can, post much more often other clips across streaming channels, do some dedicated posts on the main three for the new song, dedicated message to friends and family to add and follow along more, add a sign at all concerts for finding on IG/Spotify/Deezer, remember to mention it twice or three at concerts to find and follow along on the key channels, see if we can trial a Spotify Marquee campaign for 100 euros if it's open to the account yet, switch on IG story ads for 50 euros from the best round of testing with the new song clip
A thing I noticed in the replies, including my own, is that many of the “how to achieve inverted goal” answers include a lot of “don’t do X”.
I wonder if that’s cheating? 😅
Because really you’re just taking your preconceived notions of what to do and inverting them so you can later invert them once again.
It would be interesting to try this exercise with the condition you can’t use the words “don’t” and “not”.
You are right. Maybe we need more examples to do it properly.
For your example, it might be something like this:
Goal: Reach 10,000 users (by experimenting with different marketing ideas)
Invert goal: Reduce the number of registered users to zero
Achieve inverted goal: Delete the database, remove the signup buttons, use confusing website copy, suggest better alternatives, remove the most valuable features, make it really easy to delete your account (even by accident), make the site unusable on mobile, block search engines from indexing my website, charge prices customers are unwilling to pay, only accept the least popular payment method
Achieve actual goal: [you can fill this in…]
Haha yes! Here's an example in a workshop I ran - it was with care nurses and the organization had major recruitment (and retention) problems and the vast majority were women because it's a low paid role seen as a "woman's job". Even more pronounced in rural areas. So we did a reverse engineering - How would we not attract any man to this position? That resulted in things like (just a few easy examples of the hundreds) :
- Pay them a low wage
- Be unflexible about working hours
- Don't allow their car expenses to be deductible
- Provide scheduling rosters 48 hours in advance
- Make them do the annoying administrative tasks
- Make them wear outfits they don't like
- Don't give them any technology to do their job more effectively
- Use job titles like sister and midwife and nurse
- Tell society men don't care about looking after people
- Use pink in the advertising for roles
- Use words such as nourishing, care provider and calming nature in job descriptions
- Only give them the nursing jobs that don't provide much progression or skills improvement such as aged care
- Force them to do rotations across all the types of nursing roles
- Tell them they can't care like mothers can
- Make double shifts seem like they need to be accepted to keep your job
- Never show them the cool professions and things nursing can do for them (assistant anesthetist for operations, travelling the world, military nurse, doctors without borders, teaching, ICU care etc)
- Don't subsidize childcare if they're with a working partner so he burns out in no time juggling the household and kids outside 10 to 12 hours shifts
- Make sure there are no personal days off, mental health support for dying patients, horrible events, reducing burn out
Then we reversed it with a goal (which I think is necessary for creative thinking). If we needed to have 50% men in the candidate pool in the next six months, what would we do? (education funnel issues aside of course). This inverted some but also added many many others that had nothing to do with the inversion as the brain is working.
Maybe that helps with an example!
I've thought about this a lot this week.
Goal: more effectively monetize product
Inverted goal: do not monetize anything, continue to give everything away for free
Achieve inverted goal: continue to experiment new products but not require payment for any of them, never "get good" at any of them, be too shy to fundraise / ask for donation; or also switch to unrelated markets where I don't have competitive advantage and build in isolation behind incumbents
Achieve actual goal: use ethical strategies from free-to-play games, fundraise, focus on market where I have competitive advantage even if it's not necessarily the one with the highest returns, focus on my users