Instead of embarking on an endless search, I’ve taken a different approach: working backward. Instead of thinking about what I want to do and how I want to live, I start instead with what I don’t want to be doing and what failure looks like. By looking at what might go wrong with our lives, we can avoid obvious traps, creating more space for things to go right. One useful mental model for thinking about this is the principle of inversion, popularized by German mathematician Carl Jacobi. He told his students to “invert, always invert,” encouraging them to approach difficult problems by
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