One of my favorite tricks is the inversion process.

I'll give you an example.

When I was a meteorologist in World War II, what I was actually doing was clearing pilots to take flights.

And it just reversed the problem.

I inverted.

I said, suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots.

What would be the easy way to do it?

And I soon concluded that the only easy way to do it would be to get the planes into icing the planes couldn't handle, or to get the pilot to a place where he'd run out of fuel before he could safely land.

So I made up my mind I was going to stay miles away from killing pilots by either icing or getting them into socked in conditions when they couldn't land.

I think that helped me be a better meteorologist in World War II.

I just reversed the problem.

And if somebody hired me to fix India, I would immediately say, what could I do if I really wanted to hurt India?

And I'd figure out all the things that could most easily hurt India.

And then I'd figure out how to avoid them.

It's the same thing, it's just in reverse.

But it works better to frequently to invert the problem.

If you're a meteorologist, it really helps if you really know how to avoid something, which is the only thing that's going to kill your pilots.

And you can help India best if you understand what will really hurt India the easiest and worst.

Algebra works the same way.

Every great algebraist inverts all the time because the problems are solved easier.

Human beings should do the same thing on the ordinary walks of life.

It's constantly invert.

You don't think about what you want, you think what you want to avoid.

Or when you're thinking what you want to avoid, you also think about what you want.

You just go back and forth all the time.

Peter Kaufman, who's here today, he likes the idea that you want to know how the world looks from the top looking down and you want to know what it looks like from the bottom looking up.

And if you don't have both points of view, your reality recognition is lousy.

Peter's right.

An inversion is the same thing.

Just such a simple trick to think, how does this look from the people above me?

How does it look from the view beneath me?

How can I hurt these people I'm trying to help?

All these things help you think it through.

And they're such simple tricks.

They really help.

And yet, our great educational systems give advanced degrees, they don't teach people these simple tricks.

They're wrong.

They're just plain wrong.