Inversion
Solve hard goals backwards by engineering their opposite and then avoiding it
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Inversion, taken from mathematics and popularised by Charlie Munger, reverses a problem to make it solvable. Instead of asking how to achieve a woolly outcome, you ask how you would reliably produce its opposite, then list the concrete causes of that failure and systematically avoid them. Munger's example: rather than chase happiness, ask how you would make a happy person depressed — wreck their sleep, feed them badly, isolate them, put them in a meaningless job, strip their hobbies. Avoid those five and you are most of the way to happiness. The mechanism reframes success as the elimination of a short, nameable list of stupidities rather than the pursuit of an undefined excellence, which is why Munger credits 'avoiding stupidity' over 'seeking brilliance' for his career.
Origin
George MacGill credits Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, who built his career on inverting problems and 'avoiding stupidity' rather than seeking excellence. MacGill applied it to his own twenties, listing seven mistakes to avoid rather than goals to chase.
Core principles
- 01Avoiding stupidity beats seeking brilliance
- 02Woolly questions become tractable when flipped
- 03You can name failure causes more precisely than success causes
- 04Removing the negatives gets you most of the way to the positive
How to run it
- 1
Name the woolly question
Pick the vague, overwhelming question you cannot answer head-on, such as what you want the rest of your decade to look like.
Pro tip Inversion is most useful precisely on the fuzziest questions.
- 2
Flip it on its head
Ask how you would reliably create the exact opposite of what you want.
- 3
List the failure causes
Enumerate the concrete actions or conditions that would guarantee that bad outcome.
Pro tip Keep the list short and specific, e.g. MacGill's seven twenties mistakes.
- 4
Convert each into an avoidance rule
Turn every failure cause into something you actively refuse to do.
Watch out Don't over-index on exotic failures; the mundane ones do most of the damage.
- 5
Focus on avoidance, not chasing
Commit to steering clear of the named failures instead of fixating on a single big goal.
Pro tip Watch for the 'dogs at the door' — the failure modes creeping up while you chase a distant target.
In the wild
Facing the overwhelming question of what he wanted the rest of his twenties to look like, MacGill inverted it into: what mistakes do people make in their twenties? He listed seven — seeking comfort, surrounding yourself with people you don't admire, doing easy things, neglecting health, taking on liabilities and debt, toxic relationships, and feedback-less environments. He concluded that simply avoiding all seven makes failure almost impossible, regardless of which specific goals he pursues.
→ A durable decision filter that replaces anxious goal-chasing with a short avoid-list.
Rather than asking how to be happy, Munger asks how you would make a happy person depressed: disrupt their sleep, feed them awful food, isolate them from friends, put them in a bad job, and strip away meaning and hobbies. Avoid those five and you have captured roughly 95% of happiness.
→ A concrete, actionable route to wellbeing from an otherwise unanswerable question.
Common mistakes
Chasing the goal instead of avoiding failures
People fixate on a big target and ignore the failure modes quietly eating them alive.
Listing exotic rather than mundane risks
The obvious, everyday causes of failure matter more than dramatic edge cases.
Is it for you?
Best for
Overwhelming open-ended life or business decisions where the positive path is unclear.
Not ideal for
Well-defined technical problems that already have a known optimal path.
From the transcript
“instead of like manga basically looks at ours instead of trying to seek excellence just focus on avoiding stupidity”
“how would I make a happy person depressed and it's like quite easy the answers there then”
“if I avoid all of those 7 no matter what I do... it's almost impossible to fail”
From the episode
Mental Models 101 - How To Make Better Decisions - George MacGill - #069
George MacGill