People can’t afford to buy houses? Well, give them some extra money to buy houses! Boom. “If you do anything counter-intuitive and it doesn’t work, the extent to which you get blamed for it is 10 times greater than if you do something seemingly logical that doesn’t work.” - Rory Sutherland Just like nobody was ever fired for buying IBM, no politician is ever given a hard time for solutions that sound reasonable (at least from their own party). Here’s an entertaining chart from Alchemy by Rory Sutherland :

Politicians can’t make too many people upset, so everything they do must sound very reasonable.īut not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense. Political approaches to problem solving are always logical. Attacking the problem head on is the very rational, logical way of approaching it. But that’s not nearly as catchy, so please put away your dictionary and let’s continue using the “Subvert, always subvert” phrase. Don’t approach with a head-on charge, try to flank it.Ī more accurate way of saying it is “always approach big problems obliquely rather than head on”. The idea I’m trying to describe is that when it comes to big problems, they should not be attacked head on, but rather come at indirectly, possibly at an angle that isn’t at all obvious. The official definition is to “undermine the power or authority of an existing institution.”īut that’s not really what I’m trying to say. Turns out my vocabulary isn’t that great. Subvert, Always SubvertĬonfession time: in the process of writing this I’ve come to find out that subvert doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it meant. Here’s the rhyming cousin of it that I propose. It’s a great tool to carry with you through life. Inversion is about figuring out what will kill you and then avoiding it. Munger often sums it up with the funny phrase:Īll I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there. Bad behavior, on the other hand, is usually pretty easy to identify and avoid. What does it mean to be good? It often depends. Similarly, it’s easier to be virtuous by avoiding the “Seven Deadly Sins” than it is by “being good”. “What is good?” is a harder question to answer than “What is bad?”. What he means is that some problems are difficult to solve in one direction, but easy to solve when turned around in the opposite direction.Ī common example is health: It’s easier to figure out what is bad for your health and avoid it than it is to do it in the positive. The idea I want to share in this issue is a variant of the “Invert, always invert” mantra that Charlie Munger often cites.

Subvert means