What Others Miss

When you’re stuck, the natural instinct is to try harder at what you’re already doing. This is usually wrong.The principle of inversion: rather than asking “how do I solve this?” ask “how could I make this worse?” and do the opposite. It’s a stoic technique that often yields answers the direct approach misses.

The reason you get stuck is often that you’re proceeding from false assumptions. If your assumptions were correct, you’d have solved the problem already. So the solution is not to work harder on the current approach, but to question the assumptions.Chesterton’s Fence: don’t remove a fence until you understand why it was put there. But contrarians know that sometimes the fence was put there by people who were wrong, and the only way to find out is to question it.

This is what contrarians do automatically. When everyone else is going one direction, they consider going the other. Not to be different, but because the direction everyone else is going might be wrong.

The trick is to distinguish genuine contrarianism from mere contrariness. A contrarian thinks for herself and follows the argument where it leads. A contrary person just disagrees for the sake of disagreeing. The first is useful; the second is just annoying.

One way to test this: ask what you’d do if your current approach were off the table entirely. Most people find they can’t answer cleanly — they’ve fused the method with the goal.The law of the instrument: give a small boy a hammer, and he’ll find everything needs pounding. When the only tool you know is your current approach, every problem looks like it fits that approach. Once you separate them, the goal is usually clearer than it seemed. The path just obscured it.

The best contrarians I’ve known weren’t trying to be contrarian. They just couldn’t believe ideas that seemed obviously true to everyone else.Hitchens on this: “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” The best contrarians aren’t sceptics by identity — they just haven’t been given a good enough reason to believe. From the outside, that looks like arrogance. From the inside, it just feels like refusing to believe something false.