Charlie Munger on avoiding stupidity
Munger holds that extraordinary results come less from brilliance than from systematically avoiding the standard ways of failing. Invert problems to see what would do the most damage, be reliable, respect the outsized power of incentives (including on yourself), and steer wide of self-pity, anger, crazy cultures and the lollapalooza effects that arise when several biases combine.
11 points · 8 appearances · 1995–2023
How the view evolved
Combined biases create lollapalooza effects → Just try to avoid being stupid
In the 1995 Harvard speech the defense against misjudgment is maximal: master a 24-item checklist and analyze how biases combine into lollapalooza effects. By the 2020 Caltech interview the same project is stated as radical simplification — rub your nose in your own mistakes, keep a margin of safety, park hard problems on a 'too hard pile', 'I just try and avoid being stupid' — the elaborate taxonomy internalized into a few blunt heuristics.
Invert: ask what would do the worst damage → His secret: avoid all the standard ways of failing
In 2007 at USC inversion is a problem-solving technique — reverse the question and ask what would do the worst damage. By his final 2023 CNBC interview it has become the whole account of his success: 'my game in life was always to avoid all standard ways of failing'.
Up next
1995–2020 · changed view
“Cicero is famous for saying a man who doesn't know what happened before he's born goes through life like a child. ... If you generalize Cicero, as I think one should, all these other things that you should know in addition to history — and those other things are the big ideas in all the other disciplines. And it doesn't help you just to know them enough so you could 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.”
2008–2023 · changed view
“If you get right down to it, what I am is a lover of the progress of civilization. That turns me on.”
2007–2023 · changed view
“Well I think it's very useful to get the capitalist perspective, namely how do you make this thing work for the people that own it, because the reality will make more sense when you go at it with that perspective. So even if you don't intend to get rich, you want that perspective, because you'll understand the reality you're dealing with better. So I think you mentally want to make yourself an investor as part of the proper training of your mind. And since you have to do it anyway to improve your mind, you may as well get rich while you're doing it. And so if you underspend your income while you're life and keep learning and collect all the bonehead experience mistakes other people made and avoid them and so on, I would confidently predict that you'll do just fine.”
2007–2023 · changed view
“What are the core ideas that have helped me? Well, luckily I got at a very early age the idea that the safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want. It's such a simple idea. It's the golden rule, so to speak. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos in my opinion that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who had this ethos win in life, and they don't win just money, just honors and emoluments. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with. And there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust. And so, and the way to get it is to deliver what you'd want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.”