Charlie Munger
Invert, always invert
Study the ways it dies first
Harvard Law commencement, 1986
He was asked how to have a good life and answered the other question instead. The swap is the whole method.
What actually happened?
Invited to address a graduating class, he announced he would explain how to guarantee a miserable life, and then worked through it: be unreliable, learn only from your own experience, go down when you take your first reverse, be consumed by envy and resentment. If you knew where you were going to die, he liked to say, you would simply never go there. The talk is the method demonstrated on itself, and it is more usable than any list of virtues he could have read out instead.
One list is short and the other isn't
There are countless ways a thing can go well and a small number of ways it reliably goes wrong. The inverted question is simply a smaller problem, and a smaller problem is one you can actually finish.
Nobody in the room could say what would make the product work. Everyone could name the three things that would kill it, and two were already true.
Failure modes are checkable; success stories aren't
You can go and look at whether the runway is short, whether one customer is half the revenue, whether the one person who understands the system is leaving. 'Is this a great idea' has no such test.
The post-mortem was written before the launch, and two of its causes were fixed in the week it was written.
It does not tell you what to do
Avoiding every failure mode leaves you alive, not successful. Inversion clears the ground; something still has to be built on it. Used alone it produces people who are very good at not losing and have not won anything.
Three years of avoiding every avoidable mistake, and nothing shipped that anyone remembers.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: about to commit to a plan you believe in.
Ask first: spend twenty minutes writing only the ways this fails, then check how many are already true today.
Where it goes wrong: stopping there — a list of avoided deaths is not a direction, and people who only invert end up very safe and very still.
Lines to keep
Invert, always invert.
If you knew where you were going to die, you would never go there.
Inversion clears the ground. It does not build anything on it.
Same situation, other people are asking
By the time the data is in, will it be too late?Everyone I know is in this. I don't actually understand it.I keep listing reasons this will work. Should I do the other list?Everything I know about this came up one reporting line.I don't have enough information · all 12 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.