I was once told Dave Cottle invented the invert in lacrosse. Or at least popularized it. I've never fully confirmed whether that's true, but it certainly sounds plausible.

Coach Cottle was known for offensive innovation. The invert. The mumbo. Ideas that challenged conventional thinking.

The invert itself was a simple reframe.

Instead of asking midfielders to dodge from up top while attackmen initiated from behind the cage, coaches flipped the roles. The objective never changed. Score goals. They simply approached the problem from the opposite direction.

Today, nearly every offense in men's lacrosse inverts. What started as a different way of looking at the game became part of the game itself.

It turns out this way of thinking extends far beyond lacrosse.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, built much of his decision-making around a simple phrase:

"Invert, always invert."

I first came across this idea while reading Poor Charlie's Almanack, which has become one of my favorite books. Of all the ideas in it, this is probably the one I've found myself coming back to most often.

And Munger wasn't alone.

Claude Shannon, the mathematician and engineer often called the father of information theory, frequently used inversion to solve difficult engineering problems. (Fun fact: Anthropic named its AI Model, Claude, after Claude Shannon.)

Different fields. Different problems. Same idea.

If you have four minutes to spare, it’s worth hearing Munger himself explain this concept in the video below.

So what does this have to do with lacrosse? Everyone can benefit from clearer thinking.

Players, parents, and coaches alike face many decisions every single day. A core part of our business is helping people navigate those decisions. This is where inversion as a mental model comes into play.

A mental model is simply a tool for thinking. Inversion might be one of the simplest you'll ever use.

Instead of asking: What do I want? Ask: What do I want to avoid?

Or instead of asking: How do I succeed? Ask: How do I fail?

Knowing what you don’t want and avoiding it can be very effective.

Charlie Munger had another famous way of explaining this:

It's a funny, yet practical line. Sometimes it's easier to avoid the wrong path than identify the perfect one.

Let's look at how this concept applies to recruiting.

When thinking about recruiting, the natural question is: “Where do I want to go?”

Try inverting it: “What would make me unhappy with my college decision?”

Maybe it's...

By flipping the question, recruiting becomes less about predicting the perfect fit and more about eliminating poor ones.

The truth is, you probably can't know with certainty which school will give you the perfect college experience. There are simply too many variables.

But you can often identify what would make a school a bad fit.

That alone narrows the field considerably.

We can invert the recruiting process from the other direction, too.

Instead of asking, “How do I get recruited?”

Ask: “What would make a college coach not want to recruit me?”

Poor grades. Bad body language. Being difficult to coach. Not competing consistently. Treating teammates poorly. Not doing well against good competition.

The list can get long pretty quickly.

Players can spend a lot of time worrying about what they need to do to get noticed by college coaches. What showcase should I attend? Who should I email? How do I get a coach to watch me?

Those questions matter.

But inversion gives us another place to start: “What are the things that could make a coach cross my name off the list or never add it to begin?”

Identify those things. Then make sure you aren’t doing them.

Think about a decision or goal you’re working through right now.

Instead of only asking what you want, try asking:

You may not immediately find the perfect answer, but you can often make the problem easier to solve.

After all, our brains are pattern recognizing machines. Reframing our perspective can interrupt the pattern and reveal blind spots.

Sometimes the best way to move forward is to start by asking what to avoid

Coach Class and Coach Dunn

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