There is a video where Charlie Munger explains his method of solving problems by thinking in reverse - finding how to fail and avoiding it.

After watching a short video that compared everything that hinders me to the devil, I became intrigued and asked LLMs these questions.

Hello. I want to use Charlie Munger's thinking method of "finding how you will fail and avoiding it" to establish some specific rules for living life.

My life goals are to understand more things, to be able to see everything more broadly, while not missing the joy of being human as a social animal.

Please become a virtual devil and think about what actions you would take to ruin my life. The more specific and diverse, the better.

As a result, I received the following answers from each model. (Couldn’t ask Grok due to a 502 error)

First Answers

GPT 4.5

As a virtual devil, let me specifically list what I would do to ruin your life as much as possible. These are inversely things you must avoid in life:

**1. To hinder intellectual growth:**

• **Cultivate intellectual laziness and passivity.**

• Make yourself unconsciously consume only SNS feeds, YouTube videos, and news headlines without thinking.

• Make reading books or having serious discussions feel bothersome.

• **Get addicted to shallow information.**

• Unable to deeply immerse in one topic, only gain surface-level knowledge constantly.

• Instill the habit of wanting all information 'short, fast, and fun.'

• **Trap yourself in confirmation bias.**

• Guide yourself to always only read opinions you already agree with.

• Make yourself feel that people with opposing opinions are foolish.



**2. To prevent having a broad perspective:**

• **Trap yourself in narrow, biased relationships.**

• Only meet people similar to yourself and prevent contact with people from diverse backgrounds.

• **Make habitual criticism and negative judgments.**

• Make your worldview critical and negative, believing all new things are dangerous or abnormal.

• **Encourage repetition of experiences and avoidance of new attempts.**

• Continuously avoid new activities or challenges saying "that's not for me."



**3. To destroy joy as a social animal:**

• **Neglect relationships with people around you.**

• Don't contact friends or family, continuously postpone or feel meetings are unnecessary.

• **Make yourself listen poorly and only talk about yourself.**

• Don't understand and empathize with others' stories, make conversations always revolve around yourself.

• **View relationships only in terms of benefits.**

• Make yourself calculate what you can gain from all relationships first, destroying pure human bonds.



**4. To ruin body and mind:**

• **Make sleep habits irregular.**

• Maintain long-term sleep deprivation and reversed day-night living.

• **Induce avoidance of physical exercise.**

• Ignore physical health and make yourself live a sedentary life.

• **Continuously fall into negative thinking.**

• Frequently compare yourself to others to lower self-esteem, and get excessively frustrated over trivial failures.



**5. To shake long-term goals and values:**

• **Make yourself always chase only immediate rewards.**

• Make long-term goals feel meaningless and only pursue immediately obtainable pleasures and rewards.

• **Make yourself waver according to the environment without values or philosophy.**

• Have no firm self-standards, only care about others' evaluations, and live an inconsistent life.

• **Make goal setting and checking always be postponed.**

• Ignore the importance of planning and reflection, and be tempted to act based on mood and impulse.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet

Hello. Let's look at ways to ruin your life through Charlie Munger's inversion thinking method (counterfactual thinking). This method helps you see the path to success more clearly by first identifying the path to failure.

## Specific methods to ruin your life

### Hindering intellectual growth

1. Guide yourself to always think only comfortable thoughts
2. Make yourself thoroughly avoid opposing opinions or criticism
3. Consume only superficial information instead of deep thinking
4. Avoid difficult books and only consume light content
5. Develop the habit of not questioning
6. Make mistakes embarrassing so you avoid challenges

### Destroying social connections

1. Make yourself always only talk about yourself in conversations
2. Don't sincerely listen to others' opinions
3. Immediately cut off relationships when conflict arises
4. Cultivate jealousy toward others' success
5. Prioritize numerous superficial relationships over deep ones
6. Calculate only "what I can gain" from all relationships

### Inducing time waste

1. Keep postponing important tasks
2. Constantly have attention stolen by SNS and smartphones
3. Create a daily life that's only busy without clear priorities
4. Create an environment that disrupts deep immersion (flow)
5. Fill schedules with meaningless meetings and appointments
6. Focus on activities that give immediate satisfaction rather than long-term value

### Damaging physical/mental health

1. Disrupt sufficient sleep
2. Continuously postpone regular exercise
3. Create eating habits centered on convenience foods and junk food
4. Don't learn stress management methods
5. Weaken the ability to recognize and express emotions
6. Constantly criticize yourself without acknowledging small achievements

### Degrading judgment

1. Make yourself view complex problems only in binary terms
2. Prevent awareness of cognitive biases
3. Make yourself see only short-term gains rather than long-term consequences
4. Immediately judge new ideas without having an open mind
5. Don't consider various perspectives and contexts
6. Ignore evidence contrary to your beliefs

By recognizing these traps, you can inversely see specific directions to promote intellectual growth, build meaningful social relationships, use time wisely, maintain health, and make better judgments.

[The article continues with Gemini 2.5’s detailed response and subsequent Q&A rounds where the author asks the LLMs to derive positive rules from the devil’s strategies, and finally asks them to design habits based on the established rules. The Gemini 2.5 responses are particularly thorough, including habit design with triggers, routines, rewards, anticipated obstacles, and meta-strategies.]

Second Q&A

The author then asked all three LLMs to take the devil’s strategies and write the opposite - the actions one SHOULD take.

Third Q&A

Finally, the author asked the LLMs to design specific habits based on the established rules, using habit design principles (triggers, routines, rewards, anticipating obstacles, and meta-strategies).

Conclusion

After reading through all the responses, Gemini 2.5’s answers were the most specific and easiest to execute. I plan to gradually implement them.