The second idea that I developed very early is that there’s no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and such love should include the instru… - Charlie Munger

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.

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.

includes such things as the current and prospective regulatory climate; the state of labor, supplier, and customer relations; the potential impact of changes in technology; competitive strengths and vulnerabilities; pricing power; scalability; environmental issues; and, notably, the presence of hidden exposures.