Charlie Munger Quotes

It is not usually the conscious malfeasance of your narrow professional adviser that does you in. Instead, your troubles come from his subconscious bias. His cognition will often be impaired, for your purposes, by financial incentives different from yours. And he will also suffer from the psychological defect caught by the proverb “To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

So you can get very remarkable investment results if you think more like a winning pari mutuel player. Just think of it as a heavy-odds against game full of bullshit and craziness with an occasional mispriced something or other. And you’re probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It’s just that simple.

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.

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.

First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit, you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great.

If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?

You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment. You don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people, and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.

Demosthenes noted, “What a man wishes, he will believe.” And

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time — none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’t remember or when it’s blocked from recognizing because it’s heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it … the deep structure of the human mind requires that the way to full scope competency of virtually any kind is to learn it all to fluency — like it or not.

There’s another type of person I compare to an example from biology: When a bee finds nectar, it comes back and does a little dance that tells the rest of the hive, as a matter of genetic programming, which direction to go and how far. So about 40 or 50 years ago, some clever scientist stuck the nectar straight up. Well, the nectar’s never straight up in the ordinary life of a bee. The nectar’s out. So the bee finds the nectar and returns to the hive. But it doesn’t have the genetic programming to do a dance that says straight up. So what does it do? Well, if it were like Jack Welch, it would just sit there. But what it actually does is to dance this incoherent dance that gums things up. A lot of people are like that bee. They attempt to answer a question like that. And that is a huge mistake. Nobody expects you to know everything about everything. I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge. To me, they’re like the bee dancing its incoherent dance. They’re just screwing up the hive.

You climb as hard as you can by just advancing one inch at a time. That's the secret of life.

Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.

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

Our investment style has been given a name - focus investing - which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obvious idea. But 98% of the investment world does not think this way. It's been good for us.