Don’t look for success. Look for ways to not fail.
There is a lot of unknown things that can bring success. There is a few known that will make you fail.
“Rogers, I have suspended you along with your friends.”
The deputy headmaster said it in front of everyone. Monday parade. The whole school watching.
A few weeks earlier, students at Galanos High School had gone on strike against the teachers. They had grievances, they needed a voice, and they chose me. I was the ex-minister for sport, known among students and teachers, Pugu Boy, who spoke well and carried himself with confidence. I delivered their message. The students got what they asked for.
The teachers never forgave me for it.
Three months before our national form six examinations — the exams that determined entry into the University of Dar es Salaam, the dream I had carried for years — they sent me home. I was to report to school the night before each exam, sit under police supervision, and leave the grounds the moment the last paper was done.
They knew what they were doing. No classroom. No mock exams. No access to notes, study groups, or the daily rhythm that prepares a student for high-stakes tests. They had designed a failure. My friends cried for me. I felt it too — that cold, sinking feeling that everything you have worked toward is suddenly very far away.
I walked out of the school gates and called my mother.
I explained everything. She listened. She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked:
“So the teachers have punished you, and they are expecting you to fail — what are you going to do to make sure you won’t fail?”
That question changed everything.
Notice what she did not ask. She did not ask what I needed to do to pass. She asked what I needed to do — or stop doing — to make sure I would not fail. The direction was reversed, and with it, the entire frame of the problem.
I stopped grieving and started thinking.
I asked her to send me pocket money. I found hostels where students slept and studied. I built my own timetable, one that put in the hours the school would have given me. I tracked down past exams and used them to identify my weak areas. I studied with the other suspended students — we discussed, we tested each other, we refused to let the punishment finish what it had started.
When the results came out, I was in the top three. I earned an A in advanced mathematics — a grade achieved by very few students in the entire region.
For fifteen years, I didn’t think much about that experience. Then recently, I realised what my mother had given me that afternoon was not just encouragement.
It was a mental model.
What is a mental model?
A mental model is a tool the mind uses to understand and solve problems. Different situations demand different tools — just as a doctor, a builder, and a lawyer each carry different instruments to do their work. The tool my mother handed me on that phone call has a name.
It is called inversion.
Inversion is the practice of working backwards from the outcome you want to avoid, rather than forward from the outcome you want to achieve. Instead of asking how do I succeed, you ask what guarantees failure — and then you systematically eliminate those things.
This is not pessimism
Before we go further, let me address the thought that may already be forming: isn’t this just negative thinking?
No. And the distinction matters.
Pessimism is an emotional state. It is sitting with failure as a feeling — imagining the worst, absorbing it, letting it drain your will to act. Inversion is a strategic tool. It is looking at failure as information — naming it precisely, understanding its causes, and removing them. The pessimist says: I am probably going to fail. The person using inversion says: here are the specific conditions that produce failure — I will not allow those conditions to exist.
I did not sit in that hostel imagining how badly the exams would go. I sat there identifying exactly what would cause me to fail, and then I went to work on each one.
There is a Swahili saying: haraka haraka haina baraka — hurry has no blessing. On the surface, it looks like advice to slow down. But read it as inversion: it is not saying move slowly to succeed. It is saying rushing guarantees you lose the thing you are rushing toward. The wisdom is in what you avoid, not in what you add. Our grandmothers were teaching inversion long before it had a name.
The questions that cut through
Inversion works because failure is usually simpler than success. There are many paths to a good outcome — talent, timing, luck, networks, effort, opportunity. Most of them are outside your control. But the paths to failure are usually few, consistent, and honest. They do not flatter you. They do not depend on circumstances. They show up in the mirror.
So flip the question.
Instead of asking: How do I build a strong career?
Ask: What would destroy my career?
Instead of asking: How do I build a lasting marriage?
Ask: What slowly kills a relationship?
Instead of asking: How do I build wealth?
Ask: What behaviours guarantee I stay broke?
The answers to the inverted questions are almost always clearer, more honest, and more immediately actionable than their forward versions. Because success lives in the abstract — it is somewhere out there, in the future, vague and aspirational. Failure, when you look at it directly, is specific. You can point to it. You can remove it.
Where to apply it
In your career: Think about the next five years. Ask yourself what would most certainly derail your professional life — not diplomatically, but honestly. Common answers include: chronic financial mismanagement, burning important bridges, staying comfortable in roles that stopped growing you, confusing visibility with ability. How many of those are already present in some form? That discomfort is data.
In your most important relationship: There are a thousand things people say will make a relationship last — communication, commitment, quality time, shared values. That is all true. But there are a much smaller number of things that reliably destroy relationships: contempt, dishonesty, neglect that gets normalised, unspoken resentment that slowly calcifies into distance. Ask what those things are in your specific relationship. Then ask how close any of them are to the surface. You do not need to be in crisis for this to be useful. Prevention done early is invisible — it looks like a relationship that just works.
In your finances: Most people approach money by trying to earn more. Inversion asks a different question: what spending patterns guarantee you never build wealth, regardless of income? The answer is usually not complicated. It is lifestyle inflation that moves in lockstep with salary increases. It is the absence of any automatic savings mechanism. It is treating credit as additional income. Name your specific versions of these and you will know exactly what to stop before you know what to start.
A question worth sitting with
Think about one important area of your life right now — your career, your finances, your most important relationship, your health.
Now ask it backwards:
What would guarantee that I fail here?
Write the honest answers. All of them. Do not be diplomatic.
Then look at that list and ask: How many of these am I already doing?
The discomfort of that answer is the beginning of useful thinking.
Until then
We think. So we become.
Think deeply. Live deliberately.
Watushule