Just Don't Be Stupid
The Power of Inversion
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is a fun twist on achieving personal and professional success. We introduce the idea of inversion, which is looking at a problem from a different perspective to understand better what we’d like to avoid or achieve to ensure technological or psychological success.
Intro
We are constantly striving to achieve success, but what if the fastest way to succeed isn’t to chase tons of skills in the hope they’ll help, but to focus on something simpler: Avoiding failure, or, as I like to say, Just Don’t Be Stupid?
This challenge forces you to look at all the ways you could be stupid and find alternatives. It’s a technique called Inversion, popularized by Charlie Munger, who’s famous for saying:
, One of my most frequent collaborators wrote on the power of inversion a couple of years ago, and it resonated deeply around avoiding stupidity, failure, death, and more."Invert, always invert. Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backwards. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don't we want to go, and how do you get there?"
Inversion resonates because I was doing it 20 years ago, but I didn’t have the right name for it or Andrew's broader application. For example, in The Enemy’s Gate is Down, I shared counterintuitive insights from my time in the Army. Many of these insights were discovered through inversion.
Another way I’ve described inversion is as a function of systems thinking, where we approach problems with Insatiable Curiosity, Humility, and Intentional Reframing. That reframing is essential because if I look at a problem from a different angle, and the problem changes, I don’t fully appreciate its true nature. That’s the power of inversion: reframing a problem to understand it better, whether technology or psychology.
Applied to Technology
One of the first things I tell people from my roles as a Systems Engineer is to exhaust how this problem or design is similar to others before telling me anything about what makes it unique. In this way, we strip the false novelty away and quickly see how many things we have available that we can learn and borrow from.
This is where a powerful tool called Applied Futures provides new insight. Instead of assuming we know what will happen, Applied Futures conducts either Futurecasting, the futures we want to achieve, and/or Threatcasting, the futures we’d like to avoid. In doing so, we envision a series of possible future worlds from which design thinking can decompose and create solutions.
Threatcasting is an excellent example of inversion because it forces you to stare right at the things you’d rather avoid. In my threatcasting experience, we’ve explored techniques to destroy critical infrastructure, methods to cripple economies, strategies to unleash societal autoimmune responses, and ways to kill millions of people.
We did this to uncover ways to prevent those same outcomes. Only by inverting the problem and seeing the possible futures could we design better solutions to avoid them altogether. The cool thing is we can apply the same inversion to Psychology.
Applied to Psychology
When we cross to the personal, an obvious critique of inversion is that it forces us to stare negativity in the face. In a world that relishes radical positivity and has big, audacious goals populating the pop culture in both business and personal lives, inversion appears to be anathema.
Yet, when the world seems upside down and doesn’t make sense, the solution is to change your perspective.
recently dug into the Stoic philosophy behind this idea in Look on the Dark Side for a Change, where he shares:Think of anything you dread. Consider how it might come to pass, and then what your life would be like once it occurred. What would your day-to-day be like? How would you attempt to make it tolerable?
A key point here is to think of what you dread, consider it, and then think of ways to mitigate the dread. Sometimes, you won’t be able to stop the event, and the mitigation is merely recognition that life has ups and downs, and that’s OK.
Adding to the chaos is that we are constantly told that what we are facing is unprecedented, new, emergent, and novel. However, 2000 years ago Senica notes:
“For inexpert minds, a large portion of their misfortune lies in the novelty of it.”
— Seneca, Letters, 76
It’s the novelty, or the imagination that it is novel (even inversion isn’t that novel when we study it), that tends to cause the chaos. Inversion helps you explore that supposed novelty to uncover, sometimes very old, solutions.
For more on psychological inversion, take a look at How to Be Miserable. It lists 10 ways we can make our lives a living hell, and the inversion works because it forces us to stare directly at the causes of misery we typically like to justify.
Summary
Just Don’t Be Stupid is a great way to consider all the ways you could be stupid. The first stupid thing you can do is imagine that the situation is novel or that by only focusing on the positives, you can avoid the negatives. The first step to avoid being stupid is to Invert and identify and characterize the things we’d like to avoid.
Doing so opens up many new insights that contextualize the problem, reduce our fear of it as it becomes known, and identify new ways to either accept or mitigate negative outcomes. Whether technologically or psychologically, inversion defangs our fear of the unknown and uncovers counterintuitive insights. Inversion is a core tool I use to write these essays each week, and you can use it in your own life.
When have you applied Inversion in your life? Share in the comments below!
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Inversion is the way to go. Invert words, sentences, ideas, people. A whole other world opens itself up. Great piece, guys.
“Strip the false novelty” - this is interesting...
As I think about it now, it applies to both the dark and light sides of possible outcomes.
Both positive and negative outcomes can be unsettling due to their "novelty", so perhaps the real issue to address is indeed the fear of novelty itself.
and totally, inversing/reframing is the fun way to go, so thank you for the reminder!