Invert, Always Invert

From Munger’s commencement at the Harvard School in Los Angeles (now Harvard-Westlake) on June 13, 1986, informally titled “How to Guarantee a Life of Misery.” Not Harvard University, and distinct from his better-known 1994 USC Marshall talk on worldly wisdom. The talk demonstrates the slogan: instead of telling graduates how to live well, Munger gives prescriptions for ruining a life (be unreliable; learn only from personal experience) and treats the inverted list as the answer to the forward question.

The three words “Invert, always invert” are Jacobi’s, not Munger’s. Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was a 19th-century German mathematician whom math historians associate with the line; Munger picked it up as the label for a method he kept returning to in his talks, which are collected in Poor Charlie’s Almanack. The forward question (how do I succeed?) is usually too open; the inverted one (what would guarantee failure?) yields a concrete list of things to avoid.

The same move surfaces in management research under other names. Gary Klein’s premortem (Harvard Business Review, September 2007) has a project team assume the project has already failed and brainstorm reasons; Klein cites 1989 research by Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington showing that “prospective hindsight” (imagining that an event has already occurred) increases the ability to identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. Munger’s 1986 talk closes on the same shape: the final prescription for misery is to ignore a rustic who said, “I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I’d never go there.” Inverted, that becomes the actual advice.