The Power of Avoiding Stupidity

This simple insight from Farnam Street captures one of the most powerful but underutilised thinking tools: inversion. Instead of asking "How do I succeed?" ask "How do I avoid failing?"

Spend less time trying to be brilliant and more time trying to avoid obvious stupidity. The kicker? Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

Brilliance is rare, unpredictable, and often requires inspiration or luck. Stupidity, on the other hand, follows predictable patterns that can be identified and avoided systematically.

Charlie Munger, one of the masters of inversion thinking, often quotes the mathematician Carl Jacobi: "Invert, always invert." When facing a complex problem, Jacobi would flip it around ... instead of trying to solve it directly, he'd ask what would cause failure and work backward from there.

The power of this approach is that avoiding stupidity compounds. Every mistake you don't make preserves your resources, reputation, and options. Every obvious error you sidestep keeps you in the game longer, giving you more chances for those rare moments of brilliance to occur naturally.

Most people spend their time trying to be right. Inversion suggests spending your time trying not to be wrong. It's a subtle shift that leads to better decisions with less stress.

As Munger says, "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent." Sometimes the path to extraordinary results is extraordinarily simple: just don't do the obviously dumb things.