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.

This reframes everything about how we approach problems. 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.

In business, this might mean spending less time on growth hacking and more time on not alienating your existing customers. In investing, it could mean focusing on avoiding permanent loss of capital rather than chasing maximum returns. In relationships, it might mean identifying what destroys trust rather than trying to optimize for connection.

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.

I've found this particularly valuable in technical work. Instead of trying to write the most elegant code from the start, I focus on avoiding the common pitfalls: unclear variable names, missing error handling, tight coupling, inadequate testing. The "brilliant" solution often emerges organically from avoiding the stupid ones.

The psychological benefits are significant too. Pursuing brilliance can be exhausting and demorsalizing ... you're constantly measuring yourself against an impossibly high standard. Avoiding stupidity is more achievable and builds confidence with each obvious mistake you sidestep.

This doesn't mean being conservative or avoiding all risks. It means being systematic about distinguishing between necessary risks (those required for potential upside) and unnecessary ones (those that only create downside with no corresponding benefit).

The inversion approach also reveals hidden assumptions. When you ask "What would make this project fail?" you often discover risks you hadn't considered when asking "What would make this project succeed?" The failure scenarios force you to think more concretely about what could go wrong.

Most people spend their time trying to be right. Inversion suggests spending your time trying not to be wrong. It's a subtle but profound 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.