Some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments, with territoriality a… - Charlie Munger

First, there’s mathematics. Obviously, you’ve got to be able to handle numbers and quantities — basic arithmetic. And the great useful model, after compound interest, is the elementary math of permutations and combinations. That was taught in my day in the sophomore year in high school. I suppose by now, in great private schools, it’s probably down to the eighth grade or

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.

If you minimize objectivity, you ignore not only a lesson from Darwin but also one from Einstein. Einstein said that his successful theories came from “curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism.” And by self-criticism, he meant the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.