Charlie Munger passed away today at 99, just a month shy of his 100th birthday. It’s hard to overstate how much he shaped the way I think. Not only about investing, but also through the example he set in how to live a good life.
Here are few of my favorite quotes from him:
"Assume life will be really tough, and then ask if you can handle it. If the answer is yes, you've won."
"One of my favorite tricks in life is the inversion process. You don't think about what you want, you think about what you want to avoid. Or when you're thinking what you want to avoid, you also think about what you want. You just go back and forth all the time".
"Always take the high road, it's far less crowded"
"Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, think that it’s actually you who are ruining your life. ... Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life".
“Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant. It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it."
"If you take Berkshire Hathaway … the skill that got Berkshire through one decade would not have sufficed to get it through the next decade … without Warren Buffett being a learning machine. The record would have been absolutely impossible."
"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."
"I always say I want to know where I would die so I can never go there."
"If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?"
"Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It's not something you do just to advance in life. And there's a corollary to that proposition which is very important: it means you're hooked for lifetime learning."
"It is counterproductive for an individual to feel like a victim — even if he is."
“Johnny Carson said he couldn’t tell the graduating class how to be happy, but he could tell them how to guarantee misery. His prescriptions were: (1) Ingest chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception; (2) Envy; and (3) Resentment.
I add a few more of my own: Be unreliable. Learn everything only from your own personal experience, ignoring the lessons of others. Go down and stay down after your first few severe reverses. And minimize objectivity—refuse to challenge your own cherished beliefs.”
Thank you, Charlie.