Invert, Always Invert

Holy cow…Q4 already!

One of my favorite books this year is Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger. A big fan of Benjamin Franklin, this is Charlie’s homage of Ben’s “Poor Richard’s Almanak” to pass on the wisdom from his 99 years of life long learning.

As you enter planning season, this would be a great book to read, underline and take notes as you reflect on 2024 and look forward to your best year ever in 2025. The wisdom contained in the pages are as simple as they are profound.

An example I’ve found particularly impactful is one he learned from Albert Einstein: when facing challenging problems, “invert, always invert". Charlie was a meteorologist during the war and his primary job was to ensure pilots could make successful bombing runs and return home safely. Unfortunately, Charlie wasn’t a trained meteorologist, and didn’t really know what the hell he was doing…but he was well read and approached the problem with Einstein's advice to Invert. Charlie asked himself the question “If I wanted to send my pilots out, and ensure that they all crashed due to weather before returning home, how would I do it?” That was a much simpler question to answer: fly them into cloud cover that made the bombing runs almost impossible, and fly them into storms on the way back…that knowledge made what he needed to do much easier - just do the opposite!

This month I had Network Office training sessions with a couple different groups of U3 advisors and I kicked off our time with Charlie’s idea, asking them “if you want to ensure that you fail both personally and professionally in building your business, what would you do?” (It got their attention!) You can guess the answers I received: don’t prospect; don’t dial; don’t create urgency to take action; focus on just opening Roth IRAs instead of establishing a base of PLI; etc… the rest of the time was spent building skills and confidence around the topics they listed: Prospecting, Dialing, Compelling fact-finding and PLI conviction - they all were VERY engaged having just told me what the alternative meant!

Idea for you: As prework before your 2025 annual planning sessions, ask your leaders to write out their answer to some version of this question: “Within your area of accountability for the firm, if I challenged you to drive our worst year ever in 2025, what are the actions you wouldn’t take and what are the best new ideas you wouldn’t implement that would ensure our failure?" Reading out their answers as a kickoff for the meeting should elicit some laughter and lightheartedness, but I also believe that it will foster great discussion on what should be done better, differently, or completely retooled to ensure the best possible outcome!

My brief notes from Charlie's book are attached below.

Read my notes on Poor Charlie’s Almanack (FPP Library)

Finally, I know you all get hammered this time of year as all of the consultants and vendors try to get on your calendars to prepare for 2025, and I’m well aware I’m one of them 😉. The purpose of these monthly messages has been to give insight on how I think about advisor and leader development. Engaging them in new and compelling ways drives them to think differently, act purposefully and execute consistently to change their growth trajectory. If leader and advisor development, regardless of tenure, is an area of focus for your 2025 planning, and you need fresh thinking, I’d love to have a 10 minute conversation on how we may be able to partner in that execution.

Here’s to a great Q4!

Think Differently,

Steve