Life wisdom I learned from Charlie Munger

Life wisdom I learned from Charlie Munger

Topic
Lessons
Summary

  1. Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.
  2. Know the big ideas in the big disciplines (science, economics, history), and them routinely.
  3. Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire. Work only with people you enjoy.
  4. Get rid of people who always confidently questions about which they don’t have time to think about which they don’t have any real knowledge.
  5. Avoid extremely intense ideologies (ie. politics, sports)
  6. Don’t spend your time worrying about things you can’t fix.
  7. Don’t multi-task — if you don’t have the time to think about something deeply, you are giving your competitors an advantage over you.
  8. Every missed chance in life is an opportunity to behave well, learn something, and to not be submerged into self-pity. Rather use the missed chance in a constructive fashion.
  9. Learn to make and handle mistakes.
  10. If you can’t find yourself interested in something, you won’t succeed.
  11. Always consider arguments on the other side.
  12. Focus on reading person & business biographies.
  13. Do not mimic the herd; this means you can do no better than the average person (regression to the mean).
  14. Understand your odds; move only when you have an advantage. Bet heavily when this happens.
    1. As stock prices rise, the odds are against investors.
    2. As stock prices fall, the odds start going in their favor.
  15. Try to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
  16. Everywhere there is a large commission, there is a high-probability of a rip-off. Commission = incentives.
  17. Access responsibility for all failures, and examine exactly why we failed.
  18. Specialization is the key to survival in any species / business. If we do what everyone else does, we will spend our lives competing head on with everyone else.
  19. The people with problems are the ones who bring in business.
  20. Always be honest and truthful.
  21. It’s bad to have an argument you’re proud of, if you can’t state the arguments fort the other side better than your opponents.