Charlie Munger Quotes

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

You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don't have the cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high I.Q.

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.

There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.” The same might be said of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. It is the ultimate value investment.

So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.

It's amazing how intelligent it is just to spend some time sitting. A lot of people are way too active.

Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it's actually you who are ruining your life. It's such a simple idea. Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so-called 'iron prescription'—I think that really works.

What I would say is the single most important thing, if you want to avoid all the stupid errors, is knowing where you're competent and where you aren't. And that's very hard to do because the human mind naturally tries to make you think you're way smarter than you are.

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.

Without numerical fluency … you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest

Own your work and compound credibility.

And deprival-superreaction syndrome also comes in: You’re going to lose the whole thing if you don’t put in a little more. People go broke that way because they can’t stop, rethink, and say, “I can afford to write this one off and live to fight again. I don’t have to pursue this thing as an obsession, in a way that will break me.

Which models are the most reliable? Well, obviously, the models that come from hard science and engineering are the most reliable models on this earth. And engineering quality control — at least the guts of it that matters to you and me and people who are not professional engineers — is very much based on the elementary mathematics of Fermat and Pascal: It costs so much, and you get so much less likelihood of it breaking if you spend this much. It’s all elementary high school mathematics.

All the equity investors, in total, will surely bear a performance disadvantage per annum equal to the total croupiers’ costs they have jointly elected to bear. This is an inescapable fact of life. And it is also inescapable that exactly half of the investors will get a result below the median result after the croupiers’ take, which median result may well be somewhere between unexciting and lousy.

My second prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.