Wisdom from the World’s Most Quiet Billionaire: Charlie Munger

This week edition in summary:

• 🌟 A Quote from the Charlie Munger

• 🪔 Wisdom from the World’s Most Quiet Billionaire

• ❤ Favourite Things

🌟 Quote for the week

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically, you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, 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 will get what they deserve. by Charlie Munger

🪔 Wisdom from the World’s most Quiet Billionaire

Quick Background

Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett's longtime friend and business partner, died in November 2023 at age 99. He met Warren Buffet at a dinner party in 1959, and he joined Berkshire Hathaway in the 1970s, where he later served on the board of Berkshire, the Daily Journal newspaper, and retailer Costco.

Ready for this?

1. Avoid self-pity

   Shortly before he died, Munger told CNBC, “Everybody struggles; the iron rule of life is that everybody has their fair share of life challenges.”

   In his late 20s, he divorced after eight years of marriage and lost everything to his wife. He lost his son to leukemia after shedding a lot of tears on the walkway on his way home from the hospital, visiting his son.

   Years later, he suffered severe pain in his left eye from a failed cataract surgery and eventually had the eye removed. I've gone through all of this; here's what he had to say:

   You should never let one tragedy increase into two or three through your failure of will. If you soldier through, you can get through almost anything, and it’s your only option. You can’t afford to quit.

2. Be willing to change your mind.

   Alongside being aptly decisive as a creative, Munger advised, “they also have to be willing to change their mind when required to.”

   In 1995, Munger gave a lecture at Harvard University titled The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. Munger said the human mind is likened to the human egg, which shuts down when a sperm gets in so the next can’t. Once an opinion gets in, the mind shuts itself off to other opinions, so we stick to our concocted conclusions, even at the cost of being wrong.

   Success in business and life means being open to the fact that you might be wrong and willing to change course when asserted to be true, no matter how painful it is.

   Part of the reason I’ve been a little more successful than most people is because I’m good at destroying my own best-loved ideas, and most people aren't.

3. Be addicted to self-improvement, day in and day out.

   I constantly see people rise in life,” he said, “who are not the smartest (or) even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than when they get up and wake up every morning, able to attack the problems they faced the day before.

❤ Favourite things

• 📚 Book: Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger - Poor Charlie’s Almanack draws on Munger’s encyclopedic knowledge of business, finance, history, philosophy, physics, and ethics—and more besides—to introduce the latticework of mental models that underpin his rational and rigorous approach to life, learning, and decision-making. I highly recommend it; get the book!

God Bless!

Dami.