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. Faced with an unbeatable navy in Carthage, Rome lost battle after battle to the superior navy of the Carthaginians. It seemed as though Rome would never dominate the Mediterranean.

That is, until a Carthaginian ship was captured by Roman soldiers.

Roman engineers went to work immediately. They meticulously dismantled the ship, stripping it down to its most basic components until the Roman shipbuilders understood how to copy the Carthaginian design.

Within a decade, Rome was the dominant naval power. Their ability to build ships was unmatched. Carthage was eventually wiped off of the map.

Reverse engineering is probably inverted thinking’s most familiar example, but it’s not the only useful way to use the concept. As a painting major in school, I’ll never forget one particular assignment we had early in the Art Foundation program.

We were instructed to create a work of art with a monochromatic element in the piece. As soon as I heard about this constraint, my mind began whizzing and whirling around, seeking solutions to the problem at hand. I came up with a bunch of clever designs really quickly.

Contrast this with advanced painting classes. Our instructions were simply, “Go paint.”

It might seem like much better ideas would come from a completely unrestrained conceptual universe, but that simply wasn’t the case for me, and it wasn’t what I observed, either.

The human mind wants to solve problems, but if you just give it a blank canvas and say, “Go create”, there are way too many potential ways to go about the “solution" to the problem posed. Instead, giving yourself a narrow, specific problem to solve can be useful.

I used this trick a lot when painting: I’d give myself some kind of constraint first, then the ideas would begin to flow.

One more way I’ve found a ton of success with inverted thinking is the concept of beginning with the end in mind.

I like to set goals for myself. You might say I’m obsessed with goal-setting, because I do it every week. Every Saturday, I make a list of the things I need to get done for the week ahead.

Broadly speaking, Amara’s Law states that you will tend to vastly overestimate what you can get done in a year, and vastly underestimate what you can get done in 10 years.

So, I start with where I want to be in 10 years, and then I ask myself: how far along do I need to be after five years? Then, I ask where I need to be one year in to be where I need to be by year five, and so on.

I think this consistent goal-setting has been an enormous driver for the success of our jiu jitsu schools, and I’ve seen similar results in other areas of my life.

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The tactics of inverting thought to solve problems has shaped history, and it has melded my own life into what it is.

Today, we are faced with seemingly insurmountable problems. AI is going to take over the world by making too many paperclips, climate change is already causing real damage and chaos, and authoritarian governments are on the rise. We’re going to need all the cognitive tricks we can muster, and inverting is an important tool in the case.

Let me invert this piece for a moment, and as you: have you ever reverse-engineered a solution to a tough problem? Have you ever found constraints useful? Let’s talk!