Charlie Munger Quotes

Instead, you must do your multidisciplinary thinking in accord with Ben Franklin’s prescription in Poor Richard:52 “If you want it done, go. If not, send.

You have to learn all the big ideas in the key disciplines in a way that they're in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. If you do that, I solemnly promise you that one day you'll be walking down the street and you'll look to your right and left and you’ll think "my heavenly days, I'm now one of the few competent people in my whole age cohort." If you don't do it, many of the brightest of you will live in the middle ranks or in the shallows.

Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. … 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. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, `It’s the strong swimmers who drown.

It takes character to sit with all that cash and to do nothing.
I didn't get top where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.

not drifting into extreme ideology is very, very important in life. If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome.

Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I’ve never seen him do one.

Well, luckily I had the idea at a very early age that the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.

So life is an everlasting battle between those two forces: to get these advantages of scale on one side and a tendency to get a lot like the US Department of Agriculture on the other side, where they just sit around and so forth. I don’t know exactly what they do. However, I do know that they do very little useful work.

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

As he says, “We have three baskets for investing: yes, no, and too tough to understand.

The best armour of old age is a well spent life preceding it.

In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact.

Resist the craving for false precision, false certainties, etc.

We have three baskets: in, out, and too tough. … We have to have a special insight, or we’ll put it in the “too tough” basket.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts.... Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day–if you live long enough–most people get what they deserve.