Begin with the End

“Begin with the end in mind.”
Steven R. Covey

The original Super Mario Brothers probably occupied as much time as any subject from my 7th grade school year. It’s not that I was a terrible student, nor that I was uninterested in other activities like D&D or playing outside. Rather, I needed to focus if I was going to beat the game.

One day, I found a secret pathway to another world, skipping ahead several levels. There was a trick where you could play a couple of levels and basically go all the way to the last world in the game (World 8), where you could try to beat the final boss right then and there.

There’s a sort of cheat code for thinking that’s a bit like this. Instead of going through all the levels, you go all the way to the end and imagine what might be. This is what Steven Covey is talking about in his famous (“famous” by business and self-help literature measures) quote.

Skipping to the end is one part of the framework I want to share with you today, but let’s add a second parameter here. Suppose that, instead of imagining all the ways a project could go right, we also imagine the ways in which things can go wrong.

Then, it’s a relatively simple matter of avoiding doing those things.

This type of cognitive skill has been dubbed inverted thinking, and the term has probably been popularized the most by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s right-hand curmudgeon for six decades at Berkshire Hathaway.

Inverted thinking is incredibly helpful if you’re investing. If you’re buying stocks, you want to start with risk management, avoiding extreme high-flyers that might crash tomorrow, taking your hard-earned investment with it.

The same thing surely goes for small business ownership, where you want to minimize the risk to your income. Considering how you might run out of money and not be able to pay your staff can encourage you to plan in the opposite direction, leaving little chance for that particular dreaded outcome.

Basically: think about what you least want to happen, and then go backwards to prevent it from becoming a reality.

Munger got this idea from Carl Jacobi, a German mathematician who used backwards thinking to solve incredibly complex math problems. Working during the first half of the 1800s, Jacobi contributed significantly to the understanding of differential equations and number theory, and he was at the heart of mathematical thought.

One must always invert, his famous saying went, or man muss immer umkehren, if you’re familiar with German. It was only later on, by Munger and others, that Jacobi’s inversion tactics really became widely used as a mental model, not just a trick for solving math equations.

There are plenty of examples of inverted thinking from these other fields. One of them is even fictional: Sherlock Holmes famously says, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Any time you’re looking at a crime scene, you’re forced to work backwards. You need to run the tape from finish to start, so you can figure out how you got here. Modern TV shows like Mindhunter and Red Dragon show FBI profilers diving deep into inverted thinking, often running the risk of becoming what they are trying to prevent.

A real-life titanic thinker who used inversion regularly is Claude Shannon, the father of information theory and one of the founders of artificial intelligence (no big deal). When Shannon wasn’t busy juggling or building little robotic mice, he was thinking backwards to solve some really important and challenging problems.

One of these tough problems was noise. Noise entered the chat every time there was any sort of communication, like a third participant competing for the ears of the other person on the line.

Shannon looked at the big picture here, and he understood that the purpose of information wasn’t necessarily to convey a new message, exactly, but instead to reduce the uncertainty of the person receiving the message.

Shannon called this idea information entropy, not to be confused with intellectual entropy. This measured the amount of uncertainty in a communication system. This gave Shannon the ability to wonder when the communication might not work as intended.

In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, we use this to understand what our opponents might do in a given situation, and then we navigate away from the potential peril. There’s a great deal of discussion about what not to do.

In business, I try to practice inverted thinking whenever we’re planning an expansion or a new project to imagine what could go wrong, and while you can’t anticipate everything that might happen, you may be able to avoid serious pitfalls by carving out some time for inverted thinking.

Do you find yourself using inverted thinking in your own life? What’s a recent example from your home, work, or recreational life where you began with the end in mind and inverted your thoughts back to the beginning?