The Power of Negative Thinking

"Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then imagined the possible ends"

Really interesting.

"""Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr. (January 11, 1918 – July 17, 1990[1]) was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems. He is best known for Murphy's law, which is said to state, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

(...)

Following the end of hostilities, in 1947 Murphy attended the United States Air Force Institute of Technology, becoming R&D Officer at the Wright Air Development Center of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It was while here that he became involved in the high-speed rocket sled experiments (USAF project MX981, 1949) which led to the coining of Murphy's law.[3] Murphy himself was reportedly unhappy with the commonplace interpretation of his law, which is seen as capturing the essential "cussedness" of inanimate objects.[citation needed] Murphy regarded the law as crystallizing a key principle of defensive design, in which one should always assume worst-case scenarios. Murphy was said by his son to have regarded the many jocular versions of the law as "ridiculous, trivial and erroneous." His attempts to have the law taken more seriously were unsuccessful."""

In certain scopes, it works really well. Especially in business or college. Think that the worst is going to happen, get ready for it, and get a very nice surprise when things always end better than you thought (and also learn a lot of damage control in the way).

However, when it comes to personal life, this can be very misleading. For example, when someone near you has a serious illness, paranoia strikes fast and you start to mourn things that haven't yet happened, and if things end well, all you've got is a real bad feeling that you could have avoided just by staying at that someone's side and conforting him/her.

I think this happens because losing money or getting bad grades is not that much of a big deal compared with certain losses in personal life (plus, you usually have less control in the latter case). I'd very much lose all my money than one of my best friends, maybe it's just me.

http://www.amazon.com/Pessimism-Philosophy-Joshua-Foa-Dienst...

I found exactly same technique described in some self help book I browsed at my friend's house.

"Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead."

This appears to many people to be purely improvised and can startle them in the way that you seem to grasp all kinds of hidden issues and avoid the pitfalls, and in some cases there is a lot of improv involved, but it's really a matter of being mentally prepared and having good abstract models.

The danger of this kind of "disaster" pre-planning is scope creep. Some people will obsess on every possible bad thing, but that is not an optimal solution. Large chunks of "bad things that can happen" are either entirely out of our control or are a combination of absurdly low probability/far too expensive (of whatever resource) to justify addressing.

Concerning the goal, from what I understand it concerns one/few big goals, where one has to work hard for a long time before reaching it/them. Would smaller goals be a better approach? I tend to set many small goals, such as finishing this task by the end of the week, and I instinctively expend them as I complete them. If I realize their impact is smaller than expected, or that they even don't matter much, I tend to just forget them and move on with more important tasks. It keeps them flexible and actually forcing me to do things I'm not even sure I would if it wasn't for these small goals. By keeping goals flexible and smaller, I believe they can actually help to achieve something bigger.

The hope is that it takes less courage to visualize an uncomfortable state of affairs as a thought experiment, than to consider how likely it is to be true. But then after you do the former, it becomes easier to do the latter."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat/

No one must get too deep in negative thinking and make it a habit.

Use the negative thinking as your servant and as a powerful tool to push the limits.

For example when someone have to challenge the "status quo" to do something "impossible" or say "innovate" and they have exhausted all possible ways to do it the only way to get though it is to get angry and not accept your defeat. Your "negative thinking" makes you continue and not quit.

"Do not underestimate the power of the dark" side as they say :)

Get angry at some problem and solve it.

I wrote this some years ago, and have been wondering if my central idea (apart from the jokes) that a business case should contain falsifiable assumptions that is the analysts / entrpreneurs job to disprove would ever be seen as right outside of my own head

Of course it is exactly what Lean is all about - ah well, this is so badly seo'd even I could not google for it

Which is an example of ... "positive thinking", embracing risk taking.