Charlie Munger Quotes

As Buffett and I say over and over again, we don’t leap 7-foot fences. Instead, we look for 1-foot fences with big rewards on the other side. So we’ve succeeded by making the world easy for ourselves, not by solving hard problems.

It is in the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward. For instance, when almost everyone else was trying to revise the electromagnetic laws of [James Clerk] Maxwell8 to be consistent with the motion laws of Newton, Einstein9 discovered special relativity as he made a 180-degree turn and revised Newton’s laws to fit Maxwell’s.

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables.

And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.

On the other hand, in copying Jack Welch, I am trying to teach you something. When you don’t know and you don’t have any special competence, don’t be afraid to say so.

Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They’re too slow to make decisions, and nimbler people run circles around them.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.

Never allow oneself to have an opinion on anything when you don't know the other side's arguments better than they do.

The quotes, talks, and speeches presented here are rooted in the old-fashioned Midwestern values for which Charlie has become known: lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, sobriety, avoidance of envy and resentment, reliability, learning from the mistakes of others, perseverance, objectivity, willingness to test one’s own beliefs, and many more. But his advice comes not in the form of stentorian admonishments; instead, Charlie uses humor, inversions (following the directive of the great algebraist [Carl] Jacobi to “invert, always invert”), and paradox to provide sage counsel about life’s toughest challenges.

I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.

And once we get into microeconomics, we get into the concept of advantages of scale.

Darwin’s result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.

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.

There’s only one right way to do it: You have to get the main doctrines together and use them as a checklist. And, to repeat for emphasis, you have to pay special attention to combinatorial effects that create lollapalooza consequences.