Charlie Munger Quotes

it. I don’t mean to say that he’s only had 10 insights. I’m just saying that most of the money came from 10 insights.

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

Good ideas are rare — when the odds are greatly in your favor, bet (allocate) heavily.

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.

It’s not possible for investors to consistently outperform the market. Therefore you’re best served investing in a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds [or exchange-traded funds].

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

Richard Feynman as follows: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool.

The third helpful notion is that it is not enough to think problems through forward. You must also think in reverse, much like the rustic who wanted to know where he was going to die so that he’d never go there. Indeed, many problems can’t be solved forward. And that is why the great algebraist Carl Jacobi so often said, “Invert, always invert,” and why the Pythagoreans51 thought in reverse to prove that the square root of two was an irrational number.

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

So in the game of life, get the needed models into your head and think it through forward and backward. What works in bridge will work in life.

The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.

Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

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.

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.

I didn't get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.