Or, in his own words: “What I’m against is being very confident and feeling that you know, for sure, that your particular action will do more good th… - Charlie Munger

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.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

We all know of individuals, modern Ben Franklins, who have 1) achieved a massive multidisciplinary synthesis with less time in formal education than is now available to our numerous brilliant young, and 2) thus become better performers in their own disciplines, not worse, despite diversion of learning time to matter outside the normal coverage of their own disciplines.