Jake Says: ‘Don’t Be an Idiot’

Introducing: A weekly column from my cousin and friend Jacob Knight with his words of the week. This week, he pulls from my favorite TV show to give us some wise words on living.

“Don’t be an idiot…”

While this was a line written for laughs in the U.S. sitcom, “The Office,” there’s something to be said about how it really plays into living a good life.

Everyone has done things in life they regret. For a lot of us, those mistakes came from a lapse in judgment, rushing to conclusions, or just plain, “being an idiot.”

Charlie Munger, a billionaire American investor, reflected on his success this way:

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

I think he has a point. We tend to think of living “the Good Life” as all of the things we need to DO — go to college, get a job, buy a house, et cetera. However, there’s plenty of evidence to support the assertion that what’s more important than what we do, is what we don’t do.

A study by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer & Vohs says that, “…events that are negatively valenced … will have a greater impact on the individual than positively valenced events of the same type.”

So, eating an apple won’t have as much of an impact of avoiding another bag of chips. Quitting smoking will have a greater impact than taking up running.

That isn’t to say doing positive things doesn’t have any impact at all. The combination of avoiding negative actions and performing positive ones will have a greater impact than either one on their own, but if you are looking for a place to start, consider looking at areas where you could cut out a negative activity. See how it makes you feel.

Maybe you’ll find that for you, like Dwight Schrute, when you take the time to “[not] be an idiot,” it will have, “…changed [your] life.”