Instead of waiting for obvious failure, "anomalizing" involves proactively looking for small, early signs that reality is departing from your expectations. This mental habit allows for early course correction before a mistake becomes costly.
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A pre-mortem asks a team to imagine their project has already failed spectacularly. By explaining the hypothetical failure, they uncover potential risks and can build mitigation strategies, effectively using the power of hindsight bias in advance.
Top performers make mistakes, but they get back on track immediately. The 'Never Miss Twice' rule provides a mental framework that allows for a single failure but demands an immediate return to the habit. This prevents one bad day from spiraling into a long-term break in consistency.
To combat self-deception, write down specific predictions about politics, the economy, or your life and review them 6-12 months later. This provides an objective measure of your judgment, forcing you to analyze where you were wrong and adjust the thought patterns that led to the incorrect forecast.
Instead of waiting for a postmortem after failing, conduct a 'premortem' at the start. Proactively contemplating the specific obstacles that might prevent you from achieving your goals is a critical first step. This pessimistic-sounding exercise allows you to identify barriers like impulsivity or laziness and design solutions for them.
Negative feedback that dismisses your idea as 'nuts' is incredibly valuable. This extreme reaction forces you to rigorously test your core assumptions, revealing whether you are fundamentally wrong and saving time, or 'deadly right' about a non-obvious market shift.
Treat your goal as a hypothesis and your actions as inputs. If you don't get the desired outcome, you haven't failed; you've just gathered data showing those inputs were wrong. This shifts the focus from emotional failure to analytical problem-solving about what to change next.
Our brains are wired to find evidence that supports our existing beliefs. To counteract this dangerous bias in investing, actively search for dissenting opinions and information that challenge your thesis. A crucial question to ask is, 'What would need to happen for me to be wrong about this investment?'
Don't focus on making perfect decisions upfront. Instead, cultivate the ability to quickly reverse a bad decision once you recognize it. The inability to tolerate a known bad situation allows you to cut losses and redeploy resources faster than those paralyzed by fear or sunk costs.
Before starting a project, ask the team to imagine it has failed and write a story explaining why. This exercise in 'time travel' bypasses optimism bias and surfaces critical operational risks, resource gaps, and flawed assumptions that would otherwise be missed until it's too late.
If a highly successful person repeatedly makes decisions that seem crazy but consistently work, don't dismiss them. Instead, assume their model of reality is superior to yours in a key way. Your goal should be to infer what knowledge they possess that you don't.
