What was different about Charles Darwin's thinking process?
Subject: Creative Problem Solving by Reversal (Inversion) - Munger’s prescription for a miserable life
Event: Charlie Munger gives the commencement address to the Harvard School, 1986
Invert, always invert. -Carl Jacobi (1804 – 1851)
On this day in 1986, Billionaire businessman Charlie Munger presented a speech to the Harvard School. Munger began by explaining that his speech was inspired by someone who had previously spoken at a Harvard School graduation ceremony, the television host and comedian Johnny Carson. Following Carson’s example, Munger proclaimed that instead of presenting advice on how to live a happy life and to be a success, he would instead present advice on how to guarantee a life of misery.
As his first prescription for misery, Munger advised, “be unreliable.” Second, he advised limiting your learning to only your personal experience rather than taking lessons vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others. Unlike someone like Sir Isaac Newton who claimed that he “stood on the shoulders of giants,” Munger facetiously recommended ignoring “the best work done before yours” and becoming “as non-educated as you reasonably can.” For his third prescription for misery, Munger addressed how to deal with life’s inevitable failures: “Go down and stay down . . . .”
Munger ended his speech by critiquing the value of the “backward” thinking process he borrowed from Carson. Citing the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi, Munger stated, “It is the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward.” As a prime example of “backward” or inverted thinking, Munger cited the revolutionary work of Charles Darwin:
Darwin’s result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had. In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact.
CHARLES DARWIN - Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay
You don’t need to be a scientific genius to employ Munger’s method. Simply begin be identifying a problem you would like to solve. For example, if you are a salesperson, you might seek out ways to make your customers feel more comfortable and welcome in your store. Maybe you’ve thought about and brainstormed solutions to your problem many times and have not been able to come up with a viable idea. This is the point where using reversal might give you a new perspective. Begin by reversing the problem, by stating it in the opposite way, “How can I make my customers feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in my store?” Now brainstorm a list of ideas to see if something new jumps out.
Sometimes reversal can yield results when it happens accidentally. In 1968, after a long, late night recording session, John Lennon went home, carrying a tape of a song that The Beatles had been working on. When he arrived home, he decided to listen to the tape. Tired and not paying full attention to what he was doing, he accidentally spooled the audio tape on backward. As he flipped on the play button, he became mesmerized by the novelty of the song’s vocals playing backward. In fact, he liked them even better than when the song was played forwards. On May 30, 1966, The Beatles released their song “Rain,” the first song ever to feature backward vocals.
ALSO ON THIS DAY:
June 13, 1966: Today is the anniversary of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona. The case involved a man convicted of rape and armed robbery, Ernesto Miranda. His case was appealed, and his lawyers argued that he had not been advised of his rights before he signed a confession. Miranda’s attorneys won the case by a narrow 5 to 4 vote. The Miranda case changed the way police operate when taking a suspect into custody, compelling them to advise the accused of his or her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
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