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Imagine failure to prevent it
Nolan never expects success. He is a negative, superstitious, pessimistic person who always plans for the worst, and that sets him apart from the many people who run on a reality distortion field of self-belief.
The method has a track record. Films that drew bad reviews and flop predictions have gone on to hit number one with great reviews. Each time, Nolan temporarily bought into what the outside world was saying, and each time he came back to the same point: what mattered was that he knew the film was good and liked what he had done. When the chips are down and everyone says it's crap, that is all you have, and not believing in it from the start is a terrible risk.
Why can planning for the worst help?
Psychologist Julie Norem of Wellesley College calls the habit defensive pessimism. Her research, collected in her 2001 book The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, found that anxious people who set low expectations and rehearse what could go wrong often perform as well as optimists. Imagining each possible problem lets them prepare for it ahead of time. Norem contrasts this with strategic optimism, the habit of expecting things to turn out well.
How does a premortem work?
Psychologist Gary Klein described the premortem in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. A team imagines that a project has already failed and writes down every reason why. Because the failure is treated as certain, people feel free to name risks they might otherwise hold back. The method is used in project planning in many fields.
Where did "reality distortion field" come from?
The phrase was coined at Apple in the early 1980s by software engineer Bud Tribble. He used it to describe how persuasive Steve Jobs could be, to the point that people believed difficult deadlines were possible. Tribble borrowed the term from the Star Trek episode The Menagerie. The phrase later became shorthand for a leader's self-belief.
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