Been diving into this concept lately and it's honestly changed how I think about things. Most people obsess over how to win, how to succeed, how to make it big. But Charlie Munger figured out something different - to really understand success, you need to study failure first. Sounds counterintuitive, right? That's exactly the point. This is what they call reverse thinking, and it's the kind of thinking that separates people who actually get somewhere from those who just chase narratives.

So what even is reverse thinking? It's basically flipping the script on what everyone assumes is true. Instead of asking 'how do I win?', you ask 'how do I lose?' Instead of 'how does a company grow?', you ask 'what makes a company collapse?' The interesting part is that there's a limited number of ways to succeed, but there are only a handful of core reasons companies fail. Jack Ma said something similar - he doesn't claim to know the formula for success, but he knows exactly what failure looks like. Failure is when you give up.

Wu Xiaobo actually wrote an entire book called 'The Great Defeat' studying why companies go under. Not to depress people, but because understanding the failure patterns teaches you more than studying a hundred success stories. It's the same logic Sun Tzu used in The Art of War - people think it's about winning battles, but it's actually structured around preventing defeat. That's the real edge of reverse thinking.

There's this practice called pre-mortem analysis that's been floating around. Basically, you imagine your plan has already failed, then you work backward to figure out what went wrong. You do this before you even start executing. It's preventative thinking.

Duan Yongping - the guy who built Subor and BBK, then later OPPO and Vivo - he talks about something he calls his 'not on the list'. His personal filters are pretty strict: don't expand beyond what you actually understand, don't make 20 major decisions in a year (that's how mistakes happen), don't invest in things you don't know well, and don't take shortcuts or believe in cutting corners. He figured out that making 20 solid decisions in a lifetime beats making 20 in a year. That's reverse thinking applied to personal discipline.

The filter he mentions is sharp - if you can say 'no' to 90% of opportunities within 10 seconds, you're probably thinking about this right. Most people never develop that filter. They chase every shiny thing, make decisions too fast, and wonder why things fall apart.

This whole approach changes how you evaluate opportunities, whether in business or markets. Instead of getting caught up in the hype of what could work, you spend energy understanding what breaks things.