Charlie Munger
Warren Buffett's business partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway; also chaired Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 to 2011, where he wrote its annual letters himself.
Charlie Munger did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsthe safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 1st of 14 in this piece
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Their wordswisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 2nd of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsYou are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you’re going to learn after you leave here.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 3rd of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsI 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 when they got up and boy does that help—particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 4th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd it doesn’t help you just to know them enough just so you can prattle them back on an exam and get an A. You have to learn these things in such a way that they’re in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 5th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsThose of you who have mastered algebra know that inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can’t solve in other ways.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 6th of 14 in this piece
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Our reading
Sloth and unreliability are what to avoid: an unreliable person craters whatever their virtues
Their wordsSuch an easy answer: sloth and unreliability.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 7th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsI’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.” I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 8th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsGenerally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 9th of 14 in this piece
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Our reading
One has to allow for the self-serving bias of everybody else, and failing to do so is foolish
Their wordsYou also have to allow for the self-serving bias of everybody else, because most people are not gonna remove it all that successfully, the only condition being what it is. If you don’t allow for self-serving bias in your conduct, again, you’re a fool.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 10th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsobjectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you’re going to be a correct thinker.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 11th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsChecklist routines avoid a lot of errors. You should have all this elementary wisdom and then you should go through and have a checklist in order to use it. There is no other procedure that will work as well.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 12th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsIn this world, we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge—the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. Then, we’ve got chauffeur knowledge—they have learned to prattle the talk and they have a big head of hair. They may have fine timbre in the voice. They really make a hell of an impression. But in the end, they’ve got chauffeur knowledge.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 13th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsThe highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.
↗2007 USC Law School Commencement Addressjamesclear.com 14th of 14 in this piece
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Their wordsFirst, I had long looked for insight by inversion in the intense manner counseled by the great algebraist, Jacobi: “Invert, always invert.” I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 1st of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsThis maxim is a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 2nd of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsMan-with-a-hammer tendency does not exempt smart people like Blanchard and Skinner. And it won’t exempt you if you don’t watch out.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 3rd of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsA man has an acculturated nature making him a pretty decent fellow, and yet, driven both consciously and subconsciously by incentives, he drifts into immoral behavior in order to get what he wants, a result he facilitates by rationalizing his bad behavior, like the salesmen at Xerox who harmed customers in order to maximize their sales commissions.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 4th of 17 in this piece
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mental modelsbehavioural science
Their wordsWidespread incentive-caused bias requires that one should often distrust, or take with a grain of salt, the advice of one’s professional advisor, even if he is an engineer. The general antidotes here are: (1) especially fear professional advice when it is especially good for the advisor; (2) learn and use the basic elements of your advisor’s trade as you deal with your advisor; and (3) double check, disbelieve, or replace much of what you’re told, to the degree that seems appropriate after objective thought.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 5th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsOne very practical consequence of Liking/ Loving Tendency is that it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to “Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency,” and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 6th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsIt is easy to see that a quickly reached conclusion, triggered by Doubt-Avoidance Tendency, when combined with a tendency to resist any change in that conclusion, will naturally cause a lot of errors in cognition for modern man.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 7th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsThe best antidote to folly from an excess of self-regard is to force yourself to be more objective when you are thinking about yourself, your family and friends, your property, and the value of your past and future activity. This isn’t easy to do well and won’t work perfectly, but it will work much better than simply letting psychological nature take its normal course.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 8th of 17 in this piece
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Our reading
Trained, habitual use of simple probability math is one standard antidote to foolish optimism
Their wordsOne standard antidote to foolish optimism is trained, habitual use of the simple probability math of Fermat and Pascal, taught in my youth to high school sophomores.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 9th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsThe quantity of man’s pleasure from a ten- dollar gain does not exactly match the quantity of his displeasure from a ten-dollar loss. That is, the loss seems to hurt much more than the gain seems to help.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 10th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsFor some such reason, man’s evolution left him with Social-Proof Tendency, an automatic tendency to think and act as he sees others around him thinking and acting.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 11th of 17 in this piece
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Our reading
Learning to ignore the examples of others when they are wrong is a skill few skills exceed in worth
Their wordsLearn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 12th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsWhen a man’s steps are consecutively taken toward disaster, with each step being very small, the brain’s Contrast-Misreaction Tendency will often let the man go too far toward disaster to be able to avoid it. This happens because each step presents so small a contrast from his present position.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 13th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsIf he reduces the number of skills he practices and, therefore, the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps in the latticework of theory he needs as a framework for understanding new experience.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 14th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsIt is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 15th of 17 in this piece
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Their wordsIn general, learning is most easily assimilated and used when, life long, people consistently hang their experience, actual and vicarious, on a lattice- work of theory answering the question: Why?
↗The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (revised text, 2005)fs.blog 16th of 17 in this piece