Avoid Problems Before You Have to Solve Them
Before you read this chapter, take a moment to answer the following question: what is wisdom?
Maybe you’re getting spontaneous images of wise old ladies and wise old men popping into your head—people who have vast reservoirs of experience. Maybe you’re thinking of professors whose books could fill a small library. Or you’re picturing honest, natural-living folk, herdsmen in the Swiss Alps or simple fishermen in the Amazon Delta. Perhaps you’re imagining a hermit meditating cross-legged on a mountaintop.
Enough imagining; back to the question. What is wisdom? Someone on a TV quiz show who can list the names and star signs of all the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest might be a wise person, but they probably aren’t, or they wouldn’t have filled their brain with a load of guff. Even being in the heart of your circle of competence (see Chapter 14)—which presumes specialized knowledge—is no guarantee of wisdom. So wisdom isn’t identical with the accumulation of knowledge.
Wisdom is a practical ability. It’s a measure of the skill with which we navigate life. Once you’ve come to realize that virtually all difficulties are easier to avoid than to solve, the following simple definition will be self-evident: “Wisdom is prevention.”
The fact is, life is hard. Problems rain down on all sides. Fate opens pitfalls beneath your feet and throws up barriers to block your path. You can’t change that. But if you know where danger lurks, you can ward it off. You can evade all sorts of obstacles. Einstein put it this way: “A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
The trouble is that avoidance isn’t sexy. Imagine two film plots, A and B. In Film A, a ship runs into an iceberg. The ship sinks. The noble captain selflessly, heart-wrenchingly rescues all the passengers from drowning. He’s the last person to leave the ship and clamber into a lifeboat—just moments before it disappears forever into a spout of foam. In Film B, the captain steers the ship around the iceberg, keeping a sensible distance. Which film would you pay to watch? A, of course. But which situation would you prefer as an actual passenger on the ship? That’s equally obvious: B.
Let’s say the examples are real. What would happen next? Captain A would be invited onto talk shows. He’d get a six-figure book contract. He’d hang up his captain’s hat and earn a living as a motivational speaker at client events and team meetings for major corporations. His home town would name a street after him and his children, for the first time ever, would feel something like pride in their father. Captain B, on the other hand, would keep avoiding obstacles until his retirement many years later, sticking to Charlie Munger’s maxim: “I have a rule in life, if there is a big whirlpool you don’t want to miss it with 20 feet—you round it with 500 feet.” Although B is demonstrably the better captain, A is the one we celebrate. Why? Because successes achieved through prevention (i.e., failures successfully dodged) are invisible to the outside world.
The financial press loves nothing better than a turnaround manager, and that’s all well and good, but they should applaud managers who prevent companies needing a turnaround in the first place even louder. Yet because preventative successes aren’t externally apparent, they fly under the media’s radar. Only the individual manager and his or her team know how wisely they acted—and even then to a limited degree.
As a result, we systematically overemphasize the role of successful generals, politicians, emergency surgeons and therapists while underemphasizing the role of people who help society and individuals from veering into catastrophe. They are the true heroes, the truly wise: competent GPs, good teachers, sensible legislators, skillful diplomats.
What about your own life? Even if you don’t believe it, the reality is that at least half your successes are preventative. I’m sure you botch things occasionally, as we all do, but more often you evade stupid mistakes. Think of the dangers you’ve steered around using the wisdom of foresight—in terms of your health, career, finances and relationships.
Prevention isn’t trivial. In his book The Most Important Thing, the American hedge-fund manager Howard Marks tells a story about a gambler. “One day he heard about a race with only one horse in it, so he bet the rent money. Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away.” Henry Kissinger referred to these mistakes as a “lack of imagination.” Prevention requires more than just knowledge; it requires imagination, and imagination, sadly, is frequently misunderstood. Many people assume it means letting your mind wander while you’re drinking a glass of wine. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to produce any new ideas. Imagination means forcing yourself to think possibilities and consequences all the way through—until the last drops of juice have been squeezed out. Yeah, imagination is hard work.
Especially so, you might be thinking, when it comes to looming problems! Do you really have to keep harping on potential disasters? Won’t that just get you down? Experience says no. According to Charlie Munger: “All my life I’ve gone through life anticipating trouble… It didn’t make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came.”
I recommend spending fifteen minutes a week focusing intently on the potential catastrophic risks in your life. Then forget all about it and spend the rest of the week happy and carefree. What you’re doing in those fifteen minutes is called a pre-mortem. Imagine, for example, that your marriage is on the rocks, you’ve suddenly gone bankrupt or you’ve had a heart attack. Now track back, analyzing what led to this (imagined) catastrophe—right down to the underlying causes. As a final step, try to address these issues so that the worst never actually happens.
Of course, even if you do all this regularly and conscientiously, you’ll still overlook dangers and make the wrong decisions. Those unavoidable disasters can be mitigated by facing up to reality and tackling problems straight away. But in terms of foreseeable difficulties, it’s easier to avoid them than to resolve them. Wisdom is prevention. It’s invisible, so you can’t show it off—but preening isn’t conducive to a good life anyway. You know that already.