Simon Ramo identifies the crucial difference between the Winner’s Game and a Loser’s Game: the professionals and the rest of us. We often focus on trying to be brilliant, yet many great people get far more mileage out of avoiding making stupid mistakes. Here’s why:
Winning or Losing Points
Professionals win points whereas amateurs lose them
- In a professional game, each player plays a nearly perfect game rallying back and forth until one player hits the ball just beyond the reach of the opponent
- This is about positioning, control, spin
- Amateur tennis is an entirely different game
- Long and powerful rallies are a thing of the past
Avoiding Stupidity is Easier Than Seeking Brilliance
Most of us are amateurs but we refuse to believe it
- What we should do when we’re the amateur is to invert the problem
- Rather than trying to win, we should avoid losing
- Charlie Munger, a business partner of Warren Buffett, made this point
Losing Less
Ramo devised a clever strategy by which ordinary players can win by losing less and letting the opponent defeat themselves
- The way to avoid mistakes is to be conservative and keep the ball in play, letting the other fellow have plenty of room to blunder his way to defeat
- If you’re an amateur your focus should be on avoiding stupidity, not seeking brilliance
Investors Bet on Someone Else’s Game
Buffett used to convene a group of people called the “Buffett Group.” At one such meeting Benjamin Graham, Buffett’s mentor, gave them all a quiz.
- “He gave us a quiz,” Buffett said, “A true-false quiz. He told us ahead of time that half were true and half were false.”
- Most of us got less than 10 right. If we’d marked every one true or every one false, we would have gotten 10 right.”
- Graham made up the deceptively simple historical puzzler himself
