My older cousin taught me this lesson at a ping pong table: let your opponent make the mistakes. Win by not losing.

This extends beyond ping pong. Warren Buffett's first rule: "Never lose money." The Kelly Criterion tells you exactly how much to bet to maximize growth while avoiding ruin.

The temptation is always to swing for the fences—build an app that solves everything, chase the flashy client, launch the revolutionary product. But patience creates opportunities - stay in the game. The boring company that doesn't go out of business often finds itself last standing when markets consolidate. The steady employee who shows up and does good work gets promoted when others burn out chasing shortcuts.

"Avoiding mistakes" is hard to appreciate because we can't see the counterfactual. We don't know what disasters we prevented, only opportunities we might have missed. Brilliant moves are visible and satisfying.

This creates a bias toward complexity when simpler approaches work better. We assume more effort yields better results, overlooking strategies that work precisely because they're boring.

Sometimes the best move is just to keep playing while others eliminate themselves.