Munger described how he puts his tentative plans on the metaphorical hot seat. He spins a plan around, turns it over, and investigates it from all angles. He looks for its weaknesses and shortcomings, and tries to determine how the plan won’t work. He also recognizes that his own ability to detect the possible shortcomings is suspect. To overcome this inability to objectively assess a plan he created, Munger formally tests it against what he has determined are the twenty-four standard causes of human misjudgment. His checklist. He explained, for example, that psychological denial affects people’s ability to judge the credibility of a source of information. He noted that people’s drive to do something, rather than do nothing, leads to rash decisions that ultimately prove to be wrong. He explained how the connections and associations people hold in their minds, the over-optimism they can’t let go of, and the need to reciprocate impact the efficacy of the choices they make.
The Harvard audience sat riveted in silence for over sixty minutes, except for the occasional chuckle at the quips that lightened Munger’s delivery. At the end of his oration, Munger opened the floor up to questions. The very first remark from the first person up to the microphone was “Will we be able to get a copy of that list of twenty-four?” To which Munger replied, “Yes. I presumed there would be one curious man” (I’m sure he meant to add “or woman”).
What Munger did in that seminal lecture at Harvard was formally articulate the collected knowledge that emanated from his decades of study. And after presenting that first checklist, Munger went on to put pen to paper in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book he coauthored, condensing his list of cognitive biases into a ten-point guide. In both accounts, Munger took the component parts of those theories of human behavior that had been brewing in his brain for the extent of his career and crafted a concrete product—something real and tangible. He created a visual manifestation of his set of cognitive biases, organized as the checklist against which he evaluates his own plans.
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Despite the fact that he is the most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps is—just as Munger could also be described—a doomsayer of sorts. He foreshadows failure as a part of his routine. Back in Beijing in 2008, Phelps was on the doorstep of making history. In that year’s games, he had won seven gold medals. Only the 200-fly sat between him and winning more gold, which would make him more decorated in a single Olympic Games than anyone else in history. But right as he dived in for the start of this race, his goggles started leaking. By the 150-meter mark, they were almost completely full of water and he couldn’t see. But he didn’t panic. He was prepared for this incident because he had long made it a habit to visually simulate all obstacles he might encounter. He materializes each possible failure, crafting a vivid, concrete, and tangible image in his mind of how his plan might go wrong. Then he takes it a step further and devises the solution. In this case, he calmly switched his concentration to his stroke count—which he could do because he knew exactly how many strokes would get him across the pool as fast and efficiently as possible. As a result of practicing the art of visualizing success and troubleshooting solutions to major obstacles, he knew exactly what he needed to do when disaster struck at those Olympic Games—and did it to win his eighth gold medal. Eventually, he’d have fifteen more.
Materializing obstacles and solutions benefits not only elite athletes. Scientists have found that people who incorporate this tactic into their daily routine accomplish more of what they set out to do. A team of psychologists from the University of Chicago and the University of Cologne set up 110 adults’ smartphones to ping them four times a day for one week. Each time, respondents jotted down a description of one thing they wanted to get done that day. About a third of the time, it was something that would be fun, like reading a book. A quarter of the time, the goal involved school or work. Another quarter of the time, it involved health and fitness. Other times, the goal was aimed at relationships, managing finances, spiritual health, activism, or other pursuits. Sometimes, they were asked to think about what might make it difficult to achieve a goal, and how they might overcome those challenges. In other words, they were prompted to anticipate obstacles and foreshadow the solutions. At night they noted whether they had met the goals they mentioned pursuing throughout the day and how happy they felt. Other times, they listed a goal they were working on, but they received no follow-up prompts to help plan its pursuit.
When the goals were difficult to meet, considering the challenges and planning solutions preemptively led to over 50 percent more progress on those specific goals. This was in comparison to the progress made on stated goals for which no planning prompts followed. Moreover, when they had anticipated the challenges and solutions, participants reported feeling much happier that day. Materializing the hurdles and planning how to handle them improved productivity and mood.
Our brains actually respond to events differently when we foreshadow failure, as Michael Phelps did. Inge Gallo, a researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany, investigated why some people can overcome their fears and others can’t, even when they all want to and are trying to. In this study, she focused on fear of spiders. Arachnophobes were shown a series of photographs that included some pleasant items, like delicious-looking food, and some mundane items, such as a telephone. The occasional photograph of a spider was thrown into the mix. Some participants adopted a simple strategy to cope with these images. They just reminded themselves of their goal: “I will not get frightened.” Another group took it a step further. They stated their goal to not get frightened but also acknowledged the difficulty of this aim, and made a plan for what to do when they did see one of the forbidding images. In this case, the plan was as basic as “I’ll ignore it.” It seems like the slightest change and only a minor addition, but it had a big impact.
The participants who anticipated the challenge and planned for how they would handle it didn’t have nearly as bad an experience. We know this because Gallo used electroencephalographic recording—caps with electrodes—to study what went on inside the participants’ brains when they viewed the photographs. She measured the electrical signals sent from the visual cortex, the part of the brain that specializes in processing information we take in through our eyes. Her investigation found that volunteers who simply formed the goal to withhold fear displayed brain activity that looked just like that of the subjects who viewed the pictures without establishing any kind of goal at all. On the other hand, those subjects who had visualized a concrete plan and foreshadowed failure showed less activity in the visual cortex within one tenth of a second of seeing a spider. In other words, planning for how to react led to a sort of adaptive blindness. The visual cortex of their brains responded as if the spider wasn’t even really there, like they didn’t really see it. As a consequence, the participants didn’t feel as scared when they came upon one.
Materializing the goal coupled with the plan of action and contingencies can also help people avoid slipping back after achieving success. Traci Mann, a research psychologist at the University of Minnesota, conducted a meta-analysis asking whether diets are effective in the long run. She reviewed the results of over thirty separate diet studies—twenty years of data—and asked: Of the dieters who had met their target weight, how many had kept the weight off five years later? Unfortunately, for every one person who met their weight-loss goal, two others gained back more weight than they had originally lost. Her conclusion: Diets—and, in particular, having achieved success in dieting—can backfire.