Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forward and backward. They drive their brain in reverse. The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum; or “premeditation of evil”. An exercise also called Inversion. It is a rare and crucial skill that nearly all great thinkers and great investors use to their advantage. Inversion is different from working backward or beginning with the end in mind. Those strategies keep the same goal and approach it from a different direction. Inversion asks you to consider the opposite of your desired result. The goal is to envision the worst-case scenario in a given situation: losing your job; permanently impairment of capital; becoming homeless; becoming paralyzed; having your reputation ruined. By imagining the worst-case scenario ahead of time, it is possible to overcome the fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them. Good investors focus on how they can achieve successful returns; the best also always consider how they should manage failure. What would things look like if everything went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about how we should prepare today? Avoiding mistakes is an under-appreciated way to improve. Investors can enjoy a significant degree of success simply by being proactive, reliable, and generally mistake-free — even if you are not particularly smart, fast, or talented in a given area. Sometimes it is more important to consider why people fail in life than why they succeed. Inversion is counter-intuitive. It is not obvious to spend time thinking about the opposite of what you want. It can be beneficial for challenging your own beliefs. It forces you to treat your decisions as in a court of law. In court, the jury has to listen to both sides of the argument before making up their mind. Inversion helps you do something similar. Eliminating mistakes is an underappreciated way to improve - be it investment returns or success in general. In the real world, it is often easier to improve your performance by cutting the downside rather than capturing the upside. Subtraction is more practical than addition. This is true for two reasons: first, it is often easier to eliminate errors than it is to master peak performance; second, improvement by subtraction does not require you to achieve a new level of performance. This is about doing what you are capable of doing more frequently. It is about reducing the likelihood that you'll perform below your ability. One of the best ways to make big gains is to avoid tiny losses. Success is overvalued; avoiding failure matters more. Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.