Growth can be challenging to conceive. Take a marketing campaign as example. Leading up to its launch, you may find yourself asking the following questions:
- Which distribution channels are best suited to meeting my marketing goals?
- Which conversions (ex. a purchase vs. an add to cart) should I optimize for and what should define marketing success?
- How will I use creative and copywriting to effectively speak to different audience segments?
There are dozens of related questions that all fall the overarching one that defines this book: where do I start?
With the help of Charlie Munger, we can take a new approach to beginnings through the lens of inversion.
Inversion (and a Larger Latticework)
Charlie Munger, the late Berkshire Hathaway investor, was a proponent of using mental models to reason through challenging problems. He cultivated a network of these models, such as First Principles thinking, that he could call upon when problem solving. In his own words:
“You’ve got to have models in your head and you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, onto this latticework of mental models.” - Charlie Munger
One of the most valuable mental models is Inversion. Its key insight is that some problems cannot be solved forward, but rather, must be solved backwards. In other words: find out where your efforts are going to die, and don’t go there.
Putting Inversion Into Action
How can we use Inversion when going from 0 → .1? One way to start is by defining failure before success.
Here’s an example for that hypothetical marketing campaign we spoke about earlier. To start this Inversion exercise, I’ve listed out what failure might look like in the context of this campaign.
Once this list is exhaustive, the next step in the exercise is to “invert” the negative statements into positive ones. Here’s what that looks like:
In the end, this exercise does not yield an exhaustive campaign strategy. But it has brought us closer to defining what success looks like. There is huge value in that.
Whenever you’re building and feel stuck, try turning the problem on its head. You may find success working backwards instead of forwards.
