Here is the best blueprint for success at failing with supporting details to ensure your demise.
Procrastinate
Take long breaks often
If you get to a point when you are going to start working, do everything at once.
Overexert yourself when you finally begin a project ensuring you receive maximum stress
Do not think about what leads to wasted time
Get a Shallow Understanding of a Concept
Do not mix learning activities like reading, discussions, videos, or exercise problems—just stick to one way of studying a concept.
Do not reflect to evaluate your progress, workload, or well-being.
Do not keep things fresh or reduce monotony.
Skip fundamental knowledge of the concept
Do not identify causes of lack of comprehension
Make Sure to Burnout
Increase commitments and do not adjust your learning goal
On second thought, you do not need have a learning goal--it is better for burnout without one
Do not have balanced work life
Do not prioritize rest
Tackle everything at once since you do not have endless time
Minimize study time
Do not reflect on the actions that cause burnout
Of course, the above list are things not to do. Just to be clear, the above list are things not to do. Just do the opposite, and you will have a framework to set up a way to learn anything in a structured, less stressful way.
The concept of taking the negation of things to hopefully find a better path at solving a problem is not new. In fact, it has been around for thousands of years.
In mathematics, there is a method of producing mathematical arguments via contradiction. To prove a statement by contradiction, you negative your premise or hypothesis to get to a contradiction. This means your original premise that you negated was true.
Charlie Monger (Warren Buffet’s right-hand man) was the master of mental models to use to automate his thinking process. The list of ways to “Fail at Anything” I created earlier in this post illustrates one of my favorites of Monger’s mental models—inversion.
Charlie Munger's inversion model advises solving problems by thinking in reverse. Identify undesired outcomes, then avoid them, leading to better decisions and clearer solutions.
Inversion helps you prepare for a task in a completely different way—by focusing on things to avoid. Inversion helps to identify your weaknesses instead of just focusing on what you need to know. It also helps to simplify your decision making by understanding the gaps in your knowledge to help learn a concept more efficiently.
Inversion helps to clarify your priorities to help make your learning sessions more productive and targeted.
“All I want to know is where I am going to die, so I’ll never go there.”
Charlie Monger
Never mind, forget what I said—do not learn inversion.
