Invert — Upgrade Your Thinking

A Highly Effective Mental Model

9 min readOct 22, 2023

What is inversion? It is a method that involves turning a problem upside down to get a new perspective and help with decision-making. It allows us to avoid getting stuck in only one way of looking at a problem. Using a different perspective can help identify what we are not seeing.

“Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead.” – Charlie Munger

We may not (and often don’t) realize it, but we have certain patterns of thinking that sabotage our decision-making. We have our blind spots and preferences that obscure our objectivity. Inversion allows us to “surprise” our decision-making apparatus. As James Clear puts it, you can use it to challenge your beliefs, as if you are analyzing your decisions in a court of law — listening to both sides of the argument before deciding.

Here is an example of inversion. Last year I wrote an article about the “rules” of human ethics. The first rule I went over was the Golden Rule — “Treat Others How You Want To Be Treated”. I then mentioned a few more, which I saw were potentially more useful or robust than the Golden Rule and one of them is the inverted Golden Rule — the so-called Silver Rule. It goes: “Do NOT Treat Others How You Don’t Want To Be Treated”. Focusing on what should not be done, rather than what should, the Silver Rule makes things more specific. It is hard to figure out how we want to be treated, but I bet most of us will easily agree on how we don’t want to be treated. Reaching consensus on what is wrong may be more straightforward.

Inversion is not a new mental model. Ancient Stoics popularized an exercise called premeditatio malorum (premeditation of evils), which is where you imagine the worst-case scenario. This helps overcome the fears and also to make better plans.

Simply put, the traditional “forward” thought process goes — I want to get to A, therefore, I need to do B and C. When you invert, you go with the opposite — I DON’T want to end up at A, therefore I need to avoid B and C.

Let’s think about how we can apply inversion in different aspects of our daily lives. Here are some examples:

HEALTH AND EXERCISE

Many people often tell themselves — I should exercise, I should eat healthy, I should sleep better, and so on. We all know, it is not that easy. It takes a lot of effort to implement something. However, not doing something, should be easier, no? So now, let’s invert. What are the worst things you can do to your health? Here are some possibilities:

Minimize movement. Sit a lot. A sedentary lifestyle is known to be one of the worst things we can do to ourselves.
Sleep deprivation. This is a proven method of shortening your life. Heart attack, diabetes, obesity, mental health problems, cognitive damage, and so much more.
Smoking. Decades of research have unequivocally shown how smoking contributes to heart disease and cancer. Heavy smokers shorten their lifespan by an average of 14 years. One cigarette is estimated to cut 11 minutes from your life.
Alcohol. Alcohol, especially excessive alcohol consumption has toxic effects on our organisms, leading to chronic diseases. You name it, alcohol contributes to it — cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, liver disease, and the list goes on. Also, previous research concluding that a glass of wine a day is good for you has been proven erroneous.
Junk food and Sugary Beverages. This is often in combination with a sedentary lifestyle and contributes to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, and obesity.

Feel free to add to the list, of course — for example, spending too much time indoors and not getting enough sunlight, drinking too much coffee, eating too much white carbs, the list goes on. For gym bros out there — overtraining is a serious problem (guilty!). For older athletes — not stretching (guilty of that too!). We all know what are the things we do that hurt our health.

Now that you’ve identified the problem, start reducing or cutting it out completely. Not doing something should be infinitely easier than doing something.

Here is another way of using inversion for health benefits. Let’s say you are trying to exercise 3–4 times a week, but you don’t. Try to identify the things that do not let you do that. What are your typical excuses?

I was too tired after work
I went to sleep late
I did not have a workout plan

Whatever it is, tackle that to get on track. Reframe — skipping fewer workouts can be a more effective objective than hitting a certain number of workouts.

Think about mental health. Think of when you are at your most anxious or feel most down. What are your triggers? Is it something you do? Consider not doing it. Is it someone? Consider getting rid of people who predictably put you in a miserable mood. Is it doing meaningless work? Quit if you can. Immediately, or gradually. If you cannot, for whatever reason, try to find meaningless tasks at your work, or try to change your perspective. There is a difference between — I am just a construction worker and — I am building homes for people.

RELATIONSHIPS

You should, of course, do the things that will make your relationship stronger. But also avoid doing things that can reliably ruin a relationship. For example:

Stonewall or otherwise avoid communication
Cheat
Lie
Constantly criticize
Show contempt
Be disrespectful

This goes beyond a relationship with your spouse or a partner. Think about what you do that makes people not like you. Maybe you go from zero to a hundred in a second and lose your composure quickly? Maybe you are too defensive? Maybe you talk over people? Maybe you don’t talk at all? Identify one thing and tackle that.

FINANCES

Following Munger’s advice, instead of trying to be rich, avoid being poor. What are the things that you do that hurt your finances?

Spend more than you earn
Be in debt
Having addictions that suck your finances
Having no savings
Gambling
Not investing in your growth/learning
Unchecked shopping
Taking too much risk in your investments

Fixing these can dramatically improve your financial situation. Again, you can focus on earning more money and upgrading your investment game. But additions won’t do much if you are constantly bleeding money for the reasons above. I have seen people who were genuinely surprised at how much money they saved by eliminating one bad habit for example. Try it.

BUSINESS

If you are starting or running a business, it is useful to think about what can destroy it. For example, think about what your clients would hate. Or what would you need to do to stifle innovation and growth in your business? How can you get into legal trouble? Then try to avoid doing just that.

One concept I have come across that is useful here is doing pre-mortems. We all know what a post-mortem is. Its literal translation is autopsy — examination after death. In a business setting, it is about analyzing a project after its completion to see what lessons can be learned and what mistakes can be avoided in the future. Pre-mortem is when you think about hypothetical disasters and then deconstruct them to see how these can be prevented. Think risk-management. Take any project and imagine that it has failed. Think of how that could happen. What went wrong? Then identify the mistakes you had to make to get there and then work to avoid them. Among other things, pre-mortems are the best cure for overconfidence.

In some companies, there is a position of a Chief Dissent Officer (The Idea Killer) whose job is to present an argument against the ideas to identify the blind spots and prevent mistakes. Check out this article by Ryan Holiday if you are curious about this concept.

LEARNING

You can use inversion in learning as well. Here are a couple of examples:

Identify the methods you have used that are not producing results. Stop investing time and effort in those.
Identify what distracts you most — tackle that. For example, try leaving your phone in a different room when you are engaged in learning.
Do not spend time learning low-impact things. For example, when learning a language, focus on high-frequency vocabulary — things you are most likely to use. Here is another example — if you are studying martial arts, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, for example, do not spend time on low percentage and extremely rare techniques, unless you can fully integrate them into your game.

Generally speaking, when learning something, it is useful to focus on exactly how you are expected to demonstrate the skill. For example, if you need to learn how to speak another language, practice speaking. Minimize the practice of what seems relevant, but is not directly applicable.

Inversion is something that comes in handy precisely when you are not sure about how to handle a particular problem. For instance, at my workplace, one of the topics of discussion was how should we approach partnerships with municipalities across the country. Everyone has different views and it is very difficult to come up with coherent parameters of work, so my proposal was — how about we concentrate on what not to do? Which municipalities we are not going to engage in? What activities we are not going to support? Agreeing on the negative seems to be much easier than getting to a consensus on the positive.

In life, it pays to think about how to avoid misery, as opposed to achieving success. As Charlie Munger says: “Be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent”. Ask yourself — what is ruining my life? And then find a way to stop doing that.

Johny Carson, a comedian and TV host once gave a speech to the graduating class of Harvard University. He was asked to speak about how to be happy but instead gave a speech on how to guarantee a miserable life. There are three things, Carson said, you can do to be miserable:

1) Ingesting chemicals to alter mood or perception;

2) Envy; and

3) Resentment.

As you can see, Carson uses inversion — do these things and be miserable. Avoid them and you get a shot at having a good life.

Charlie Munger has referred to Carson’s speech on occasion and added a few recommendations of his own. Want to be miserable?

Be unreliable — the fastest way to have doors shut in your face;
Learn only from your own experience, ignoring the experience of others — guaranteeing second-rate life;
Stay down when life puts you down — those who give up easily, are guaranteed misery

Inversion can be applied in all aspects of our lives. It is an immensely useful mental model and you should definitely give it a try if you haven’t already. Any time you are confronted with a problem and you are not sure how to handle it, ask yourself the following questions:

What is it that you can do that would put you furthest from your goal?
What would make you achieving this goal impossible?
What would be the ultimate blunder?
How can you make things worse?

Once you have the answers to these questions, avoid those things.

CAUTION! Keep in mind, that inversion is useful, but should not be the only tool you use in decision-making. It is great as a complementary way of thinking. If you ONLY concentrate on the negatives, you are missing out on the things that can produce positive results. Inversion is useful but offers a limited perspective. Inversion can also lead to you being risk averse. Sometimes in life, you need to take risks.

Inversion is helpful when you want to avoid trouble. Think of it as a stupidity filter. Paraphrasing Munger, avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be smart. Munger’s ultimate inversion is: “I wish I knew where I was going to die, so I don’t go there”.

If you wish to read more on mental models and decision-making, I recommend you first visit Farnam Street. There are excellent books on the subject, here are a few: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig, any of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s books, Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish, and The Great Mental Models (3 volumes) by Farnam Street.

If you want to read more about the philosophy of Stoicism, check out the books by Ryan Holiday, Massimo Pigliucci, William Irvine, Ward Farnsworth, Peter Sellars, David J. Robertson, and Pierre Hadot. You can also read the original works by Ancient Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Ryan Holiday’s website The Daily Stoic is an excellent resource on Stoicism.

If you liked this article, here are some of my articles you might want to explore:

Invert — Upgrade Your Thinking

A Highly Effective Mental Model

Written by Rational Badger