Inverting Ideas

“All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.”

Charlie Munger’s quirky quote seems ironically appropriate for me to use. He died last month, just shy of his 100th birthday.

Charlie imparted a lot of wisdom into the cosmos, including the idea that it’s much easier to learn from the mistakes of others, and that includes the eminent dead, as he put it.

One of the concepts Charlie spent a lot of time talking about was how to solve problems by inverting them. His quip about death is an example of how to think this way.

Today, let’s explore the incredibly useful, time-honored concept of problem-solving through inversion, finding unexpected solutions to challenging problems.

Reverse engineering is a very old tradition. If you want to know how something is built, it’s very intuitive for us to first take the thing apart. Only once you’ve done that, can you begin to understand how to build it from scratch.

This is precisely what the Romans did during their republic era. …