Invert

There is an expression in texas high school football – You don’t win by making the big play, you win by not making the big mistake.

This idea goes counter to how most people approach winning. It is usually all about being amazing, how fancy and clever can you be. However, there are more sports analogies that speak to this.

In basketball, offence wins games, defence wins championships.

In rugby, the forwards decide who wins, the backs decide by how much.

Success then hinges on being good most of the time rather than great for a single moment. You don’t need the lucky touchdown, you need to stop the lucky touchdown.

Invert

The great Charlie Munger talks about this. He calls it Inverting. You want to think of what success typically looks like and then invert that idea to what failure would look like.

Now that you know what failure looks like, you act in a way not to create success, but to avoid failure. Munger’s business partner, Warren Buffet, arguably the best investor of all time says his first rule of investing is to not lose money.

It is not quite as sexy as no one talk about fight club but you can see the inversion in his message. He is not trying to get rich, he is just trying not to lose money.

How does it look for you?

Instead of focusing on getting new clients, what does it take to keep your old ones happy? How much does it cost to get more clients vs how much does it cost when you lose one?

Can you make your current customers happier and give them more value? Is that a better use of your time?

How much does it cost to hire and train a new staff member? Maybe instead of getting some amazing new hires you just try not to lose staff?

Instead of doing some fancy new workout, you make sure the workouts you do currently count.

Not worrying about reading another self-help book but implementing the ideas of the last ones you have read.

What inverting can you do?