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The Power of Negative Thinking
I just finished Annie Duke’s latest book, How to Decide. For those that don’t know who Annie Duke is, she rose to fame as a professional poker player in the United States having won over 4 million dollars during the course of her career. She stopped playing poker in 2012 and is now an author and successful consultant to businesses and entrepreneurs.
The purpose of the book is to help readers become more effective decision-makers by thinking critically and more objectively when making decisions. I don’t want to spoil the book by summarizing it in its entirety, but I feel compelled to share one of my favorite chapters of the book called “The Power of Negative Thinking.” The objective of the chapter is to teach readers how to think positive, but plan negative. One of the techniques for doing this is to perform a premortem. The term, premortem, was first coined by the psychologist, Gary Klein, who is a research psychologist famous for pioneering in the field of naturalistic decision making. Just as a postmortem is used to determine the cause of death in someone or something, a premortem is performed before a goal or task is established as an attempt to figure out why something may die or fail.
Per the book, “In a premortem, you imagine yourself at some point in the future, having failed to achieve a goal, and looking back at how you arrived at that destination.” To…
