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Thinking forward is an automatic process. Cause, then effect. Input, then output. A to B. It feels logicaland normal to start with a conclusion, then find justification around it.But we can always take our thinking a step further. Sometimes, the best way to get the answers you want is to think backwards. Its called mental inversion. Turn the whole thinking process upside down. As the great algebraist Carl Jacobi said, Invert, always invert. Put another way, What would guarantee I fail at X?” is a better question than How do I achieve X? Most people focus on the obvious process because the brain doesnt like to think through ugly pitfalls. Starting from B to A helps you avoid the results you dont want. Its one of the most powerful tools I use to think clearly. To turn your decision-making process upside down, start from the back. Thinking backwards works because it forces you to reflect on what may be missing. The human brain is wired to save energy. It wants quick answers. Slowing down to see the full picture helps you cover all the basics of your decision-making process. Inversion helps you ask better questions. It can improve your clarity. Psychology research backs this up. A study in Cognitive Science showed that framing problems in reverse helps people make fewer errors in judgment. It works because it breaks default thinking patterns. It slows you down just enough to think more deliberately. The antidote to mental fog Clarity disappears in abstraction. If I try to think through every possible positive outcome, I get overwhelmed. But if I ask, Whats the dumbest mistake I could make here? I suddenly see the risk clearly. When I want to be productive, I dont just make a to-do list. I make a not-to-do list. Thats mental inversion. It opens up a whole perspective Im missing. Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu has said, To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. When I write, I dont just think about everything I should include. I also look for what to cut. What confuses the reader? What slows them down? I try to remove what makes the post unreadable. And try to get rid of that. Inversion works because subtraction is often more effective than addition. It applies to almost every area of life.In his book, The Bed of Procrustes, author Nassim Taleb writes, Knowledge is subtractive, not additivewhat we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do). Think like a contrarian Reversing your thinking also trains you to be mentally independent, assuming the opposite of what you believe and testing it. It reveals hidden assumptions. Dont just look for whats true. Look for what could be false. You dont always need a new good idea. Sometimes you just need to clear out the bad ones. Look at opposites. Always invert. Indeed, many problems can’t be solved forward, says philanthropist and investor Charlie Munger. By exploring the worst, you can unlock the best. When in doubt, reverse. Dont just pursue outcomes. Find the blind spots people normally ignore. Sometimes the fastest way forward is to look backward first. How to apply inversion in life If you are stuck on big, knotty questions, invert. How do I find happiness? is vague. Instead, ask, What are the specific, proven actions that make me miserable every single time? For me, its skipping quality sleep, isolating myself, and overthinking. If life satisfaction is what you want, dont just ask, How do I live a happy life?” The more helpful question is, What makes my life miserable? List those things, and get rid of them first. Is it a specific experience in your relationship? Poor health or lack of purpose? Be specific. Detail the things that make you unhappy. Now try avoiding them. Its a precise way to eliminate everything draining your soul. For good health, avoid everything that makes your body worse off over the long term. Bad sleep, ultra-processed food, no exercise, sedentary lifestyle. Think through how people ruin their health. Dont start with what should I do? Start with what habits destroy health? Get rid of those first. Subtraction before addition. To improve your social relationships, spend less time with your connections who drain you. Career benefits If you want to apply inversion to your career, think about what people do that hinders their careers. Complacency. Refusal to adapt or learn new skills. Over-promising and under-delivering. Avoid those traps. You dont need complex systems. You need fewer blind spots. Inversion applies everywhere. In business, you can focus on what would make your new project an absolute failure in record time. The answers will be clear. Ignore your customers. Spend money you dont have on things you need. Assume youre the smartest person in the room. Dont validate your idea. Be inconsistent. Start with your anti-checklist. Your actual plan becomes the inverse of that list. Listen obsessively. Be ruthlessly frugal. Test everything. Be more consistent on what moves the needle. Seek smarter advisors. The path forward becomes clear from the list of things to avoid. Inversion gets rid of mental traps, shows you what matters, and stops you from making the same thinking errors. If you want to think clearly, start thinking backwards.
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E-Commerce
A new business infrastructure is emerging with enormous potential impact but almost no conscious design. In this new world, algorithms negotiate with algorithms, making decisions that shape markets, determine the course of careers, and decide whether companies succeed or fail. Humans, meanwhile, risk being left to watch from the sidelines. On LinkedIn, posts written by AI models are liked by bots and commented on by AI assistants. In recruiting, candidates use AI to draft résumés while companies use AI to evaluate them. In procurement, some organizations are already using AI to draft requests for proposals, or RFPsdetailed documents that invite vendors to bid on supplying goods or serviceswhile vendors are turning to AI to generate the proposals they have been invited to submit. The efficiency gains that AI can deliver are very realautomation can save time, cut costs, and improve consistency. But this does not mean we should ignore the dangers that those gains obscure. If we want to avoid slipping into a world in which humans are increasingly irrelevant, we need to be both alert to the risks and intentional about designing processes and tools to mitigate them. What Changes When Algorithms Interact In order to navigate this new reality, business leaders must first understand it more precisely. Here there are four important features of our algorithmically abstracted world: The Audience Changes New technologies often transform business, but whats happening now is different. The new technology isnt just providing new tools, but a new audience. This isnt an entirely new phenomenon. Humans have been tuning content for algorithms in some areas for years, as in the case of search engine optimization for websites. But not only is the scale now changing, but the algorithmic audience is taking over both sides of the conversation. When algorithms speak to other algorithms, language changes from a medium for human understanding into code for machine processing. For a job seeker writing an application today, the best path forward is not always to try to tell their professional story in a way that will be compelling to a human audience. Instead, it will often be better for them to encode keywords and phrases to maximize their score in the applicant tracking system (ATS scores). And, ironically, the best tools for creating this kind of optimized application are often algorithmic themselves: generative AI models. This does not mean that communication has stopped. It has not. Rather, it has changed. In addition to, and sometimes in place of, human meaning, a different kind of meaning is becoming increasingly important, one that is measured in match scores, engagement rates, and ranking positions. Humans are still involved in the loop, but only at certain points, and much of the process goes on without human intervention. Metrics Are Replacing Reality In 1975, the British economist Charles Goodhart came up with what is now known as Goodharts Lawthe idea that when a measure becomes the target for action, it ceases to be a good measure. The idea is that once people make decisions with the goal of meeting certain metrics, the underlying behavior that the metric was meant to measure is changed as people shift from focusing on the real, underlying goal to trying to optimize their score. Briefly put, once we understand there is a system, we always try to game it. Goodharts Law becomes increasingly relevant as we move toward autonomous algorithmic interactions. For example, ATS systems score candidates based on keyword matches, years of experience, and educational credentials. Candidates respond by using AI tools to optimize for exactly these metrics. But high scores in the assessment system then lose their intended meaning: Where a high score once meant that a candidate was probably a good fit for the job, now it may just mean that the candidate has access to tools that are good at gaming the scoring system. Tacit Knowledge Erodes Teachers and sports coaches have long known that much of the most important learning for their students or athletes happens in the process of doing the work rather than in a flash of insight when an explanation is given. When managers write performance reviews, they arent just documenting performance; they are also developing their ability to observe, evaluate, and articulate feedback. When teams craft project proposals, in addition to bidding for work, they are clarifying their thinking, discovering gaps in logic, and building shared understanding. This tacit knowledgethe skills and insights that emerge from doing rather than consuming informationerodes when AI takes over the process. Purpose Shifts Our current business functions evolved in a human-driven world. They contain processes designed by humans, for humans, to achieve some human goal. When these processes are outsourced to autonomous algorithmic interactions, often they stop serving the original purpose. In fact, the whole point of doing them can be lost. Take performance reviews. These originally had the clear goal of assessing employee capabilities to support actions aimed at increasing the effectiveness of the human worker. But if we end up with AI on both sides of the interaction, the whole process becomes performative. For instance, if a knowledge worker uses AI to write his reports, and his managers uses AI to generate the workers performance reviews, the original purpose of the review process is no longer being served. This doesnt mean that nothing valuable is taking place: an AI assessment of the quality of AI outputs can still tell us something useful. But it does mean that the reason for carrying out the reviews is now a pretenseimproving the effectiveness of the human worker has become irrelevant to the process that is actually being conducted. Four Strategic Responses As algorithms increasingly transact with algorithms, business now operates on two levels at once: an algorithmic layer where signals are exchanged between machines, and a human layer where meaning and value are created. Leaders must guide the interaction between these layers so that efficiency gains do not come at the expense of judgment, learning, or purpose. Here are four practical steps: Protect Human Judgment: Not every decision can or should be automated. Leaders must deliberately ring-fence certain domainsfinal hiring calls, creative development, setting organizational purposeand ensure that human judgment retains the final say in these areas. Generally, where values, creativity, and culture are at stake, a human should be the final decision maker. Translate Between Worlds: As business anguage splits into two distinct trackssignals for machines and meaning for humansleaders will need translators. These are people and processes that can interpret ATS scores, SEO rankings, or engagement metrics and reconnect them with human insight. A résumé may score well, but does the candidate bring originality? A post may perform, but did it actually persuade? Translation layers stop organizations from mistaking algorithmic proxies for real understanding. Design for Learning: Some activities are valuable not only for their output but also for the tacit knowledge they generate. Leaders must protect key processes as sites of practice, even if they are slower or less polished. Short-term efficiency gains should never come at the cost of eroding the capabilities on which long-term success depends. Protect the Purpose: When business activities shift into algorithmic exchanges, its easy for the form to survive while the function disappears. A performance review still gets written, but the developmental conversation never happens. A proposal gets generated, but the shared thinking never occurs. Leaders must continually bring activities back to their underlying purpose and ensure that the process still serves that purpose rather than becoming an empty performance. Algorithms are now part of the basic fabric of business. Resisting this shift is as pointless as commanding the tide not to come in. But while this change is inevitable, it must still be managed and steered by leaders who are aware of what is at stake. By protecting judgment, translation, learning, and purpose, organizations can ensure that automation delivers efficiency without erasing the human meaning that business depends on.
Category:
E-Commerce
In part four of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Companys oral history of YouTube, insiders describe how the companys Partner Program began sharing ad revenue with creators, kicking off the age of the professional YouTuber. As monetization transformed the platform, creators faced the newfangled challenges of managing fame in the viral video age. YouTube, meanwhile, wrestled with hate speech and other unsavory content. With YouTube increasingly competing with TV in its classic form, it also spent billions to bring one of broadcastings most iconic offeringsthe NFLon board. Comments have been edited for length and clarity. Read more How YouTube Ate TV Part one: YouTube failed as a dating site. This one change altered its fortunes forever Part two: Pit bulls, rats, and 2 circling sharks: The inside story of Google buying YouTube Part three: How YouTube went from money pit to money printer Ian Hecox, cocreator (with his high school friend Anthony Padilla) of the comedy duo Smosh: We were one of the first 10 channels on YouTube to get monetization [in 2007]. That allowed us to move out of our parents’ houses and into a house where we lived and worked for multiple years. Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube chief product officer/CTO (20082014): At first you had to know somebody to get into the Partner Program. The choice to open it up in 2009 was big. It was heavily motivated by our interaction with Sal Khan and Khan Academy, and how important it was to support creators like that.Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, the pioneering maker of educational videos: I think I got on YouTube’s radar because of [Mehrotra]. He’s a close friend. He used to say, You know, Sal, I checked your viewership. If you turned your ads on, you could maybe make a living off of this.Mehrotra: Of every dollar that came in [to YouTube], 55 cents went right back out [to creators]. That was a promise we were willing to make. It was a very hard decision at a time when we were losing a lot of money.Justine iJustine Ezarik, YouTuber: The first few years, I wasnt making a lot of money. But then the YouTube Partner Program came along. And then the brand deals started coming. Zahavah Levine, YouTube general counsel, chief counsel (20062011): Paying this new generation of YouTube creatorswho developed content specifically for YouTubeled to an entirely new ecosystem for unknown performers and filmmakers by giving these artists new ways to promote their work to a global audience and rise to fame. Meanwhile, YouTubes cultural influence was still surging. Kevin Allocca, YouTube culture and trends executive (2010present): In 2010, you had Double Rainbow and Auto-Tune the News. Some of the Lonely Island stuff from Saturday Night Live was popping as well. In 2011, you had Rebecca Black and Nyan Cat. It was kind of the peak viral video era. The parents of unknown 13-year-old singer Rebecca Black paid $4,000 to produce a video of her song Friday. It got about 1,000 views in its first month on YouTubeand then, after going viral, racked up 167 million more in four months. Rebecca Black, singer: Friday was never intended to be a part of the internet. The idea of it being [seen] by anyone more than my family and the people I was making it with was the furthest thing from my mind.Allocca: The things that were viral at that point were the ones that people were sharing across different social media platforms or that were being embedded across all the big blogs. Though Blacks song hit the Billboard charts, it was widely mocked online, and she was targeted for harassment, including death threats. Black: The idea of putting yourself out there, for me as a kid, was terrifying. I dont think the internet knew at all what it was turning itself into, what it already was at that point. There was such a Wild West of the dark web and the deep web and strangers on the internet. As a child, theres just no way that you even can truly grasp what that means. Founded in 2010, VidConan annual conference for creators, executives, and fanshelped make the platforms community tangible. Tara Walpert Levy, Google ads director (20112021); VP, Americas at YouTube (2021present): We started taking advertisers and agencies to VidCon, where they could see the relationship between the creators and the fans.Jim Louderback, general manager and CEO, VidCon (20172022): All you had to do was stand there and watch a famous creator walk across the Anaheim Convention Center. The teens would scream and yell and run after them. It was Beatlemania for YouTubers.Ezarik: At the first VidCon I brought T-shirts to give away, and I was handing them out in the lobby. You cannot do that now. There are too many peopleit’s a safety hazard. But back then, we were all just hanging out. We didn’t know any better. How YouTube Shaped CultureI Counted to 100,000!, January 2017Jimmy MrBeast Donaldson shares 40 hours of himself counting, sped up to 23 minutes. His increasingly lavish stunts eventually make him YouTubes most followed creator. In 2014, Susan Wojcicki (19682024), a key architect of Googles ad business, succeeded Salar Kamangar as YouTubes CEO. She was soon confronted with complaints from marketers whose ads were being shown with videos that included hate speech and other offensive material. Some of them suspended advertising on the platform. Levy: Peple would send us videos and say, This is a problem.Johanna Voolich, YouTube VP of product management (20152021); chief product officer (2023present): We needed to figure out how to lean into the community guidelines that wed had, how to make them stronger, how to work on our advertiser guidelines, how to work on enforcement. How YouTube Shaped CultureCobra Kai, May 2018An updating of the 1984 movie The Karate Kid, this series is a hit among the companys big-budget YouTube Originals. After two seasons, it goes to Netflix. Ultimately, creating YouTube videos is still about connecting with a community and staying human, even if the demand on creators can be incessant and the good stuff can feel like its swimming in a sea of slop. Rhett McLaughlin, cocreator and cohost of Good Mythical Morning (2012present), whose recent topics have included a review of every flavor of Spam: You sit down and watch some videos that are designed for engagement, and you do that for an hour; you walk away and you feel like your brain has just had all its serotonin drained out of it. Link Neal, Good Mythical Morning cocreator, cohost: The cornerstone of everything we do is that were inviting viewers into our friendship. Chris Schonberger, CEO of First We Feast, which produces Hot Ones (2015present) featuring celebrities chatting while eating increasingly spicy wings: [Hot Ones host] Sean [Davis] says that the audience is like a cat that tells you where it wants to be scratched. Michelle Khare, whose activities on Challenge Accepted (2018present) have ranged from joining the circus to training at the FBI Academy: When we release an episode, we have immediate feedback. Many times we take those learnings and apply them to the next video, rather than having to wait for the next season of the show. Casey Neistat, filmmaker and YouTuber: You can have a moderately or mildly successful channel on the platform if you approach it with a moderate or mild level of attention. When I found a real inflection point in my YouTube channel by posting every day, I made the decision to go into that as aggressively as possible, to post every day for something like 800 days in a row. The demands on me were tremendous. Felicia Day, actress, singer, writer, and YouTuber: iJustine [Ezarik] is the survivor. Shes talked a lot lately about how shes pacing herself, not sharing as much, because you cannot sustain it as a human being. If you cant fill your well, because youre always online, youre going to burn out. Ezarik: Right now Im obsessed with Labubu, so I have a bunch of Labubu content coming out. I like sharing it with my audience, and if theyre not interested, theyll just click away and watch something else. Keeping consistent is key, even if youre not posting every day. Just letting them know that Im still here. How YouTube Shaped CultureSkibidi Toilet, February 2023Generation Alpha binges on Alexey Gerasimovs animated series about humanheaded toilets. It garners tens of billions of views within months and spawns memes and merch aplenty. As YouTube grows ever more central to how billions of people entertain and inform themselves, its boundaries have gotten tougher to pin downto the benefit of creators and viewers alike. Neistat: In the mid-2010s, YouTube was elevating specific creators. And in the decade since then, theyve necessarily taken their foot off the gas of defining what it means to be a creator, because they breached this critical mass where they no longer needed to tell people what the platform was. Everyone had their own understanding. What’s come out of that is really special. It’s expanded the definition of what it means to be a YouTuber. Day: When I launched my company, Geek & Sundry, on YouTube [in 2012], YouTube was looking to Hollywood to make content. Native creators weren’t as encouraged or valued or seen as important. And now it’s like creators rule. Its a wonderful place to be. Kevin Perjurer, a YouTube documentarian whose Defunctland channel tells the stories of abandoned theme park attractions: When I started on the platform [in 2017], it was all about regular uploading. You know, You gotta pick your day of the week, and then hit that time with a video of similar runtime and a similar style, and that’s how you grow. That is completely gone in terms of the modern-day YouTube, for better, I think. YouTube is now much more about longer projects that took a dedicated amount of time and effort put into them. Allocca: There’s not a day goes by that I don’t see something where I’m like, I don’t even know what I’m looking at right now. The ways that people use this technology evolve with the ways that society and human creativity evolve. Along with enabling YouTubers to explore new frontiers, YouTube has become essential to some of the worlds most well-established content providers as they seek mass audiences in changing times. One long-in-the-making landmark moment came in 2022, when it acquired rights to the National Football Leagues Sunday Ticket package, formerly a DirecTV staple. Hans Schroeder, executive VP and COO, NFL Media: I go back to somewhere in 2005, even before Google bought YouTube. A couple of us took a day trip out to Google and met with Jennifer Feikin, who was running Google Video at the time. Our excitement only grew once they acquired YouTube, and you saw the growth of that platform. Mehrotra: In 2012, we tried to buy the rights to Sunday Ticket from the NFL. We were ready to pay $2 billion for it and ended up not being able to make the offer. We couldn’t get Larry [Page] to approve it. And YouTube ended up with the exact same deal for the same price 10 years later. Christian Oestlien, YouTube VP of product management (2015present): As with all deals, it came together quickly. I was down in Australia at the time, so it was a lot of 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. type meetings. Schroeder: There was always excitement that we could do something together. They launched the YouTube TV platform and distributed NFL Network and RedZone on that. And that led to Sunday Ticket. Oestlien: One thing that’s really nice about NFL Sunday Ticket was it built on top of the several years of experience we had on YouTube TV of delivering sports as low-latency, high-quality broadcast-level experiences. We built a really big fan base on YouTube across sports with our clips and highlights business and our partnerships with the NFL and others. Levy: The NFL is doing incredibly creative stuff on YouTube, above and beyond distributing their content. Their strategy was very specific: They wanted to partner with us on younger and more female viewers. And so they did a whole series of partnerships with our creators where they let them backstage at exclusive events. Schroeder: As you think about the creator content that they have and how that gets wrapped around an NFL game, were just at the tip of the iceberg now. Oestlien: We’re 10 years into many of us working on our partnership with the NFL. It’s a really nice milestone to showcase how far the company has come and how invested we are in making sure that these great sporting moments can be a big part of the YouTube culture. Additional reporting by María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, David Salazar, and Steven Melendez.
Category:
E-Commerce
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