💪A powerful quote, a simple action, and a spark to ensure your continued progress…

Welcome to Wise Words Weekly!

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🤔Every week we unpack one timeless quote to spark your personal growth, mindset, well-being, relationships, leadership, and gratitude, one small step at a time. 📈 None of this content should be construed as any type of investment or other professional advice.

We're taught from an early age to solve problems by asking some version of the same question:

"What do I need to do to succeed?"

It's a perfectly reasonable question.

But Charlie Munger, the longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett's business partner, became famous for asking a very different one.

"What could cause me to fail?"

Munger was a passionate student of mental models, psychology and human behavior. One of his favorite ways of approaching difficult problems was something called inversion thinking.

Instead of attacking a problem only from the front, Charlie said to turn it around.

Want a successful career?

Don't only ask what successful people do. Ask what behaviors would almost certainly destroy your career.

Want a great marriage?

Don't only study happy couples. Ask which behaviors consistently destroy trust.

Want to improve your finances?

Don't only search for ways to make more money. Identify the behaviors most likely to create financial trouble.

Munger summarized much of his philosophy this way:

"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent." - Charlie Munger

There's something wonderfully liberating about that idea.

You don't have to make genius decisions every day.

Sometimes you just need to stop making the decisions that keep hurting you.

Inversion is a decision-making framework that asks you to look at a problem backward. Instead of focusing exclusively on how to achieve the outcome you want, you identify the actions and conditions most likely to produce the outcome you don't want.

Then you work to avoid them.

Munger credited the great German mathematician Carl Jacobi with influencing this way of thinking. Munger described Jacobi's approach with a simple instruction:

"Invert, always invert."

There's an important distinction here.

Inversion isn't pessimism.

You're not sitting around imagining everything that could possibly go wrong because you're afraid to act.

You're thinking about failure so you can act more intelligently.

Suppose you're considering starting a business.

The conventional question is:

"How can I make this business successful?"

Inversion asks:

"What would virtually guarantee that this business fails?"

Running out of cash?

Selling something nobody actually wants?

Ignoring customers?

Taking on expenses you can't support?

Failing to adapt when the evidence changes?

These are all things most people don’t put much time or thought into.

But when you do, suddenly, everything looks different.

You still need a strategy for success. But now you've identified several cliffs you don't want to drive over while pursuing it.

That's where inversion thinking intersects beautifully with a growth mindset. Growth isn't just about adding better habits or learning new skills. Sometimes growth begins when we're willing to identify what isn't working and stop repeating it.

And sometimes we discover that we've been using versions of these mental models for years without knowing they had names.

That realization happened to me when I started thinking about my years conducting surveillance while hunting fugitives.

Long before I'd ever heard someone call it "inversion thinking," I was using a version of it while conducting surveillance.

Before setting up on a house, I'd try to think through as many possible scenarios as I could. The question running through my head was usually pretty simple:

"What are the odds?"

What are the odds he'll turn left instead of right when he backs out of the driveway?

Is there a major traffic artery closer in one direction?

If I know where he works, which way would he most likely travel to get there?

If I don't know his employer but know the kind of work he's done in the past, are there businesses nearby that might employ someone with those skills?

Is there a convenience store or gas station down the road where he might stop for coffee or fuel before work?

Sometimes the clues were even smaller.

Does the grass along one side of the driveway look like it's been driven over more often than the other?

Most people would probably never think about something like that. To me, every little detail was another piece of information that could help determine where we positioned our surveillance vehicles.

None of those observations guaranteed anything. People are unpredictable.

I was simply trying to increase my odds of success while reducing the odds that we'd get caught out of position and lose our bad guy.

And it worked. A lot.

I learned this from one of my best friends and mentor, Bryan, back when I was a rookie.

Bryan was constantly coming up with new scenarios in his head. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting in the passenger seat of his patrol car as we were going down the highway. He explained to me how he spent a lot of time running different scenarios through his mind. Because of that, we were much more prepared than the guys who weren’t doing that.

Decades later, my case-closure numbers for fugitive cases were much better than many of the guys I worked with. I don't say that to brag. I mention it because, looking back, I think one reason was that I spent a lot of time following Bryan’s lead and thinking about what could go wrong before it went wrong.

What I was doing wasn't pure inversion. There was also a lot of probabilistic thinking involved.

But the underlying lesson was remarkably similar.

Don't only ask:

"How do we catch him?"

Also ask:

"What could cause us to lose him?"

Then do everything reasonable to reduce those possibilities.

You don't have to be hunting fugitives to use that kind of thinking. The same concept made Charlie Munger a very, very rich man. And it will work in whatever you are doing, too.

Most of us have been conditioned to look for the brilliant move.

The incredible business idea.

The perfect investment.

The revolutionary productivity system.

The one decision that changes everything.

Munger's inversion principle challenges that instinct.

What if extraordinary results sometimes come from something much less exciting?

Avoiding obvious mistakes.

Think about your health.

You could spend hundreds of hours searching for the perfect exercise program. But if you're sleeping terribly and eating poorly every day, optimizing your workout probably isn't the highest-leverage move.

Think about your career.

You can study leadership and productivity endlessly. But if you're consistently unreliable, those additional strategies aren't going to repair your reputation.

This is one reason inversion can become a powerful growth mindset tool.

Before asking, "What should I add?" try asking:

"What should I stop?"

Sometimes subtraction creates more progress than addition.

(By the way, if you aren’t sure where your growth mindset currently sits, before and after self-assessments are included in the Billionaire Wealth Mindset Blueprint. There will be a link at the bottom of this newsletter. Keep reading.)

Munger's inversion principle wasn't developed in a psychology laboratory, but modern decision science gives us an interesting parallel.

Psychologist and decision researcher Gary Klein developed a technique known as a premortem.

Instead of waiting until a project fails and conducting a postmortem, a team imagines beforehand that the project has already failed.

Then everyone asks:

"What caused it?"

The team generates plausible explanations for the imaginary failure while there's still time to do something about them.

The underlying psychological concept is called prospective hindsight.

A 1989 study by Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo and Nancy Pennington examined what happens when people imagine a future event as though it has already occurred and then explain why it happened.

Klein later brought this concept into practical decision-making through the premortem.

Notice how closely that resembles inversion.

Instead of asking only:

"How will this plan succeed?"

Ask:

"Imagine this failed. What probably caused it?"

That's not negativity. It's preparation.

And it can be particularly valuable because enthusiasm can make us blind to weaknesses in our own plans.

Inversion gives us permission to search for those weaknesses before reality finds them for us.

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Former professional poker champion Annie Duke spent years making decisions in an environment where certainty simply didn't exist.

In poker, you rarely have all the information.

You don't know exactly what your opponent is holding. You can't control the next card. Even a mathematically strong decision can produce a bad result.

That forced Duke to become comfortable asking a better question:

What are the odds?

Sound familiar?

Duke later transformed those lessons into work on decision-making under uncertainty.

One of the most important ideas is separating the quality of the decision from the quality of the outcome.

A good outcome doesn't prove that you made a good decision.

A bad outcome doesn't automatically prove that your decision was bad.

What matters is whether you thoughtfully considered the information available at the time.

That's an important companion to Munger's inversion principle.

Inversion asks us to identify how we might fail.

Probabilistic thinking reminds us that eliminating every possibility of failure is impossible.

The goal isn't certainty.

The goal is to improve the odds.

That's exactly what I was trying to do with those surveillance vehicles during the years I was hunting fugitives.

Speaking of improving your odds of success, you may really enjoy this: Unlock the Echo: How One Simple Shift Can Improve Your Success, Joy, and Impact Overnight

And in other success stories… Mrs. Fields started with cookies; Michael Dell started with computers. Others started with lessons, books, software, or services. The vehicle may change, but the underlying math of entrepreneurship doesn't. Curious what your own idea could become? Experiment with different scenarios using the free MindRev Entrepreneur Income Calculator.

You can apply inversion thinking to almost any meaningful decision with a simple exercise.

Be specific.

"I want to improve my career" is vague.

"I want to earn more responsibility at work during the next year" gives you something to examine.

Instead of asking:

"How do I earn more responsibility?"

Ask:

"What would make my boss reluctant to give me more responsibility?"

Now you're looking at the problem from another direction.

Maybe it's missing deadlines.

Maybe it's poor communication.

Maybe it's waiting to be told what to do.

Examine the failure points of others you have observed. Learning from the failure of others doesn’t hurt quite as bad as learning from your own failures. And it compounds your learning opportunities.

Don't create an endless catalog of disasters. Identify the few things most likely to matter.

This is where inversion becomes even more useful.

Not every risk deserves equal attention.

Which failure is most likely?

Which one would cause the most damage?

Which one can you actually control?

You don't need a perfect plan.

Reduce the obvious risks first.

Then start looking for opportunities to improve.

This is how inversion becomes practical rather than philosophical.

The next time you're facing an important decision, take five minutes and ask:

"If this goes terribly wrong, what will probably have caused it?"

You might be surprised by what becomes obvious when you look backward.

Use AI to brainstorm possibilities you may not have thought of.

If the combination of inversion and "What are the odds?" resonated with you, Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets is an excellent next step.

The book explores how to make better decisions when you don't have complete information, which is most of the time.

One of its most valuable lessons is learning to separate your decision-making process from the eventual outcome.

Sometimes you make a smart decision and lose.

Sometimes you make a terrible decision and get lucky.

The goal isn't to predict the future perfectly.

It's to build a decision-making process that gives you better odds over time. It’s a tool to build your growth mindset.

Charlie Munger would probably appreciate that approach.

Speaking of building a growth mindset, many readers are now checking out my new book and complete mindset transformation kit, The Billionaire Wealth Mindset Blueprint - a complete 200-page daily operating system with a 30-day challenge and before/after self-assessments. Click below to check it out right now!👇

If you would like a list of other excellent books to read, check out the MindRev Media Recommended Reading List.

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Hi, I'm Grant, founder of MindRev Media.

For years, I've been fascinated by a simple question:

Why do some people consistently achieve extraordinary results while others remain stuck in the same place year after year?

The answer, more often than not, comes down to mindset.

Wise Words Weekly was created to share the lessons, books, ideas, quotes, and strategies that help people break free from the "average person" way of thinking and develop the growth mindset that successful people use to create better outcomes.

My goal is simple:

💡 Help you think bigger
🚀 Help you take action
📈 Help you unlock more of your potential

I'm grateful you've decided to join us.

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Love this edition of Wise Words Weekly? You may really like this one, too! Robert Kiyosaki's Wise Words On What The 💰Rich Buy But The 😔Poor Do Not.

Your mind is one of the highest-return assets you'll ever own! Start compounding it today. Here’s to your ever-growing future!

Your friend,

Grant

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