## Core ideas that helped Charlie Munger
- The safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want.
- You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
- There's no love that's so right as admiration based love and that love should include the instructive dead.
- Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.
- it's not something you do just to advance in life
- The rapid advance of civilization came only when man invented the method of invention. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
- You can progress only when you learn the method of learning.
- “A legal mind is a mind that when two things are all twisted up together and interacting, it’s feasible to think responsibly about one thing and not the other.”
- “A man who doesn’t know what happened before he was born goes through life like a child.”
- Big ideas: 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.
- The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work; problems frequently get easier and I would even say usually are easier to solve if you turn around in reverse.
- inversion will help you solve problems that you can’t solve in other ways.
- Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind.
- A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.
- Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought.
- “If you want to persuade, appeal to interest not to reason.”
- Another thing: perverse incentives. You don’t want to be in a perverse incentive system that’s causing you to behave more and more foolishly or worse and worse.
- Incentives are too powerful a controller of human cognition and human behavior, and one of the things you are going to find in some modern law firms is billable hour quotas
- Perverse Associations: And you particularly want to avoid working directly under somebody you really don’t admire and don’t want to be like.
- The way I solved that is I figured out the people I did admire and I maneuvered cleverly, without criticizing anybody, so I was working entirely under people I admired.
- Objectivity Maintenance: Checklist 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.
- non-egality: You want to get the power into the right people.
- In 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.
- If at all feasible you want to drift into doing something in which you really have a natural interest.
- assiduity: sit down in your ass until you do it.
- every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
- The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.
- Valiant-for-Truth in The Pilgrim’s Progress: “My sword I leave to him who can wear it.”
_“The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.”_