Stop trying to be excellent.

Start trying to avoid mistakes.

Hi guys,

Hope you are well. I’m doing okay, Alhamdulillah.

I write this at 5:36 pm on a Sunday evening, feeling very tired but very fulfilled. The past week has been really interesting, to say the least. I have been at the highest of highs, feeling happier than I have felt in a very long time. Also, awon challenges kan face mi, meaning I also spent a lot of the past week feeling frustrated and running upandan for a completely unforeseeable problem.

But Alhamdulillah, I have numerous reasons to be thankful.

Anyhoo, let's get to it.

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Avoiding mistakes is better than being excellent

I recently read a Farnam Street blog post on avoiding stupidity. As a big fan of Charlie Munger, I really connected with it. The article boiled down to a single idea.

To succeed over a long period of time, you are better off trying to avoid mistakes than trying to be excellent.

When I was in the university, some of my friends called me 'Baba 70'. Why, you ask?

Well, it was because I very regularly scored in the 70 to 75 range in many courses, barely making an A. I think Apostle once joked that if A had started from 80 instead of 70, I would never have made a first-class. 😂

And he was absolutely right. You see, I was never one to target getting 90/100 or 80/100. It just felt like too much work. Instead, I was much more focused on utilizing the Pareto principle.

What is the Pareto principle, you ask? 😭

Stop asking questions, you're making the newsletter long and I don't have energy again. 😂

The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, basically means that 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. Or as I like to think about it, 80% of results come from 20% of the effort.

So whenever it was exam szn and I needed to hit the books, I went to squat with my brother Oghena in Jaja Hall for about 3 to 4 weeks. I could have gone for 5 to 6 weeks, but that felt like too much stress. And I could have gone for only 1/2 weeks while we were actually writing the exams, but I never did either.

For a typical semester of about 4+ months, less than a month of intense focus (roughly 20%) was all I needed to ensure that I had covered about 80% of what I needed to know. And every once in a while, I found myself in a situation where I had a few days or hours before an exam and was yet to cover the vast majority of the syllabus.

I always asked myself a simple question.

What would pain me if I missed it?

Most lecturers do not design an exam for the whole class to fail. If a theoretical exam had five questions, at least one would be easy peasy. Maybe the lecturer even repeated the test question or an assignment question that was answered in class.

Then another question would probably be super difficult. Only the very brightest students would be able to give it a good shot. Maybe a very complex proving, or a long essay on an area that wasn't really covered in class but was in an obscure part of the textbook.

And then the remaining three would be somewhere in-between. They would probably not be super straightforward (and maybe have a twist or the iii. sub-question is super vague), but they would likely not be extremely difficult either. The average student would likely be able to at least attempt part of all three.

So, what would pain me if I missed it?

As at a few days/hours to the exam, I probably already knew the easy-peasy question already. And I knew that no matter how hard I tried, there would probably be some difficult area of the course that I could not possibly cover in time. So I always focused my efforts on the areas of the course that the three medium difficulty questions would come from.

Because if I failed a super technical and difficult question, nobody cares. Most of the class probably failed it anyway, and there was still a good chance that I would land in a good spot grade-wise.

What I absolutely hated was failing those 'middle’ questions, as failing them would automatically ensure that I was far away from the range of 'A students'. Looking back, I was not necessarily trying to be excellent. I was trying to minimize my errors.

I have realized that in many areas of life, people endure 'meh’ performance, so far as major mistakes are not made.

A man does not give his stay-at-home wife the 300k allowance she received in her rich father's house? She will probably bear with him.

The wife is perpetually late to events, consistently frustrating her early-bird husband? He will likely learn to live with it.

A fund manager gives his investors only 20% ROI when some other investors in the market got 30%? They will manage it.

But if DNA tests reveal that a 'mistake’ has been made and a man is not the real father of his children, wahala dey.

If a fund manager invested in a startup that failed and he has to explain to his investors that 90% of their capital has gone down the drain, Kirikiri lo ma sun si.

All these examples are just to illustrate the point. If you want to succeed over the long term, focus less on achieving outstanding success. Focus more on avoiding unnecessary mistakes.

** Jara content:

"The thing that some people say, 'If someone loves me, he accepts me as I am’, gets spread around, and it's wrong. If something is wrong with you, then it is upon you to change and to fix yourself.

And if someone really loves you, he's not going to accept you just as you are; instead, he's going to try to get what's defective about you fixed and what is lacking in you, completed. And he's going to be quick about giving you advice and getting you straightened out.”

- Dr. Muhammad ibn Ghalib Al-Umari

Have a great week. ✨