One of Charlie Munger’s famous ideas is inversion. For example, Charlie would ask: how can I lead a miserable life and proceed to answer that question. To that question, Charlie would list ideas such as:

• Live with envy
• Live with resentment towards others
• Get addicted to substances, alcohol
• Be unreliable at everything you do (I can vouch from observation that this one works.)
• Do not learn from others’ mistakes
• Have a victim mindset
• Ignore inversion

Would Charlie do them? No, of course not. Instead he would proceed to do just the opposite because the opposite will probably take you away from misery.

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Luck has a big role to play in our lives.

Say you are a good software programmer and you work on a particular technology. If that technology does well, you do well. If that technology gets obsolete, your path becomes harder. Your outcomes aren’t entirely under your control and therefore you must understand the role of luck and if possible align yourself away from headwinds and towards those with tailwinds.

Back in school, my teachers used to say: don’t worry, just work hard. Good advice but can also be bad advice. What if they were training me to be the best swordsman and I brought a sword to a gunfight?

Instead I would tell some young person: work hard but also get lucky. So how can you get lucky? What if we approached it like Charlie Munger – by first inverting and asking: how can I remain unlucky? And then proceed to do the opposite.

Here are some definite ways to remain unlucky. It’s not a comprehensive list and you can always find new ways to remain unlucky.

Don’t think probabilistically

I once met a man who said he didn’t invest in stocks. That’s pardonable. But he went on to say, that his father forbade him from any kind of gambling. And so he never indulged in gambling. Or learnt to play cards. Or invest in stocks. Or think probabilistically.

When you learn to look at the world probabilistically, wonderful things can happen. For example – you may be willing to try new things, look at things playfully. Another example, as I am writing this blog, a thought comes to my head that: what if people ridicule me? Yes, I admit, it is a realistic outcome. Most things I write about isn’t exactly earth shattering. But ridicule is just one of the outcomes from a wide range of outcomes. The probability maybe 20%. And even if that were to happen: so what? Should I stop doing what I like because of what somebody thinks? If my writing is bad, I can learn to write better. If my ideas are outdated, I can learn new ideas. So ridicule may actually help me.

If you learn to invest well and proceed to invest even then there will be situations where you will lose money. But on the whole, you’ll do well. So, out of 10 blogs or 10 investments or 10 endeavors…there will be failures in some. So what? The ones that do well could do well massively. In fact, not taking action because of fear of failure is another sure shot way of remaining unlucky.

If you don’t take chances when the wind is in your favor, it could be a big mistake of omission. Mistakes of commission are visible, mistakes of omission are invisible. Hey, but if you want to remain unlucky, don’t bother with all this…don’t take any chances. Ever. What if you fail? What will people think?

To remain unlucky, do not watch this video. What if it is a complete waste of your 1 min?

Many years ago after I had quit my job and become a full time investor, my uncle asked me what I do. And so I explained. He listened. And then he said : that is like gambling. I felt bad that day, but after having watched this video many times, I now think of what he said as a compliment.

Don’t be a learning machine

To remain unlucky – treat your mind as a fixed deposit. Ideas that were deposited in during your childhood or education should be treated as fixed. And Fixed Deposit is a good way to invest and yet stay poor, and a good way to stay unlucky. (In my early 20s, I used to think what can be learned is finite. Yeah, I was that stupid.)

The well that you find yourself is all there is. The world is only as much as you can see and as much as you can experience. Learning something new may require unlearning old things, may require giving up pet ideas. Therefore to remain unlucky, don’t learn.

For example – don’t learn about evolution, don’t learn about how human civilization came about or any such thing because that may make you question your belief system.

Find other unlucky and miserable people and form a WhatsApp group to diss the new and terrible things happening in the world. That way, you will continue to hear what you want to and make it impossible for new ideas to find you.

Don’t believe in Signaling

To not win big deals, ignore appearances. Make sure you and your work look untidy and inappropriate. Send your overweight salesman to sell your weight-loss drug, send your bald salesman to sell your hair care product and send a shabby salesman to sell wealth management product. When presenting to clients, don’t bother contextualizing the communication. After all, the clients are going to do the hard work of searching for the real diamond in you or your work. That’s what they are there for.

Don’t make it easy for clients to find you, don’t invest in SEO or don’t invest in customer service. If you are a top firm, don’t bother with the right address…instead give that rundown theatre as a landmark. If you are a professional, don’t bother creating a neat profile on LinkedIn, don’t bother to create a nice resume (maybe using a paid software) and definitely send emails from your Gmail.

Don’t believe in randomness

Because you don’t believe in randomness, don’t attend seminars, webinars, events, exhibitions, meetings, workshops etc. Also, don’t write blogs, don’t speak up, don’t create any sort of content, don’t use social media responsibly. Don’t bother to give out your visiting cards. Don’t believe ideas in one field can be used in another. When everything is certain and pre-determined, why bother with randomness?

Chance meetings of people striking great opportunities at airports, golf courses and restaurants or discoveries by accident are all somethings that happen to others and will never happen to you. Why take a chance?

And of course keep a closed mind.

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One of my all time favorite books is How to get lucky. Last year, I gifted it to three people. I don’t think the first person read it. The second told me: nothing new, everything already known. The third read it multiple times and himself bought and gifted copies to multiple people. The third person appreciated the book because he had thought about it and will probably get luckier even more because he now has a good framework.

The second person, unfortunately to this date suffers from a victim mentality. He says he is good at writing and so I asked him to write about the many projects that he has worked on. Has he done it? No. To him, what I had to say was just regular water. Of course, doing nothing is also a way to remain unlucky.

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We all have good ideas. But how about bringing in more luck to your game along with those skills? There is a book recommendation and plenty of ideas in this blog.

May you be lucky!