Q: What does your workday look like?
A: Well, I have always sought, since I quit law practice [in 1965], to have a lot of time in every day to read and think. And talk to a few friends about this or that. And I don’t do that because it will make me more money, I do it because it’s my nature. And I had to use that nature because I needed a living for a big family. But it’s just my nature.
Warren’s the same way. We both hate too many appointments in one day. We both have long segments [of free time]. The lives we live would look to anybody else like academics.
[---]
Q: How much time do you spend reading in a typical day?
A: Oh, it’s huge. I read myself to sleep every night. I read enormously. I like doing it. Not only that, what I found very early in life was that once I learned to read and handle elementary math, I really didn’t need professors or anything. I could figure out almost anything I wanted better from the written material than from having some professor tell it to me, because he’d be going too fast or too slow or telling me something I already knew or didn’t want to know. And so of course I like doing it by reading.
You look at [Andrew] Carnegie and [Benjamin] Franklin, they had a few years of primary school, they learned everything by themselves by reading. Whatever they needed, they just learned. It’s not that hard. Imagine educating yourself by firelight, no lamps, no electricity, after a day’s brutal work. Our ancestors had it tough.
[---]
Part of the reason I’ve been a little more successful than most people is I’m good at destroying my own best-loved ideas. I knew early in life that that would be a useful knack and I’ve honed it all these years, so I’m pleased when I can destroy an idea that I’ve worked very hard on over a long period of time. And most people aren’t.
[---]
Q: Why is it so hard to overturn entrenched ideas?
A: It’s insane. I’m fixing a lot of insanity. But that’s my standard thing. I don’t know how to do anything complicated. I know how to avoid insanity, even if it’s conventional. That’s all I know. I don’t even try to be smart. I just try and be not insane and pay no attention to the traditions.
You want the architecture to facilitate the world the way it is and the world the way it’s going to be, not the way the world has been, and it’s not very difficult. It’s just the most elementary common sense. But you’ve got to throw away some of the old precedents, which are stupid.
The interesting question is, when things are perfectly obvious and you have a great profession like architecture, why is everybody so massively stupid? And the answer is it’s hard to be reasonable. There are a million tricks the human mind plays on its owner. That’s what causes stupidity. Think of how many times you’ve said to yourself, ‘Why in the hell did I do that?’
It’s just massively stupid. I don’t like massively stupid. Berkshire tries to take the decision-making power, where it’s important, out of the hands of the stupid and put it into the hands of those people that are good at thinking. That’s our secret.
[---]
Q: Someone once asked you what accounts for your investing success, expecting a long complex answer, and you famously replied, “I’m rational.” So how do you define rationality?
A: People who say they are rational [should] know how things work, what works and what doesn’t, and why. That’s rationality. It doesn’t help if you just know what’s worked before, because if you know why, then you’ll be better at it. So rationality is: Across a broad range of disciplines, you know what works and what doesn’t and why.
[---]
Q: But why isn’t Berkshire easier to emulate?
A: We’re talking about very simple ideas of just figuring out the standard stupidities and avoiding them. And I actually collect them!
Some people collect stamps. I collect insanities and absurdities. And then I avoid them, and it’s amazing how well it works, because I’ve gone by [the examples of] all these people that are more talented than I am.
If I had set out to invent more quantum mechanics, I would’ve been an also-ran. I just set out to avoid the standard stupidities, and I’ve done a lot better than many people who mastered quantum mechanics.
And it’s a way for mediocre people to get ahead and it’s, it’s not much of a secret either. Just avoid all the standard stupidities. There are so many of them, and so many brilliant people do it.
[---]
Q: I wouldn’t ask most people this, but I’m sure you won’t mind. What would you want the first paragraph of your obituary to say?
A: Both Warren and I feel it’s our moral duty to be as rational as we can possibly be. A lot of people who are brilliant in some ways tend to make these utterly asinine decisions in other ways. We both tend to collect the asininities of the world in a kind of checklist. And we try to avoid everything on the checklist.
- Charlie Munger, Unplugged
A: Well, I have always sought, since I quit law practice [in 1965], to have a lot of time in every day to read and think. And talk to a few friends about this or that. And I don’t do that because it will make me more money, I do it because it’s my nature. And I had to use that nature because I needed a living for a big family. But it’s just my nature.
Warren’s the same way. We both hate too many appointments in one day. We both have long segments [of free time]. The lives we live would look to anybody else like academics.
[---]
Q: How much time do you spend reading in a typical day?
A: Oh, it’s huge. I read myself to sleep every night. I read enormously. I like doing it. Not only that, what I found very early in life was that once I learned to read and handle elementary math, I really didn’t need professors or anything. I could figure out almost anything I wanted better from the written material than from having some professor tell it to me, because he’d be going too fast or too slow or telling me something I already knew or didn’t want to know. And so of course I like doing it by reading.
You look at [Andrew] Carnegie and [Benjamin] Franklin, they had a few years of primary school, they learned everything by themselves by reading. Whatever they needed, they just learned. It’s not that hard. Imagine educating yourself by firelight, no lamps, no electricity, after a day’s brutal work. Our ancestors had it tough.
[---]
Part of the reason I’ve been a little more successful than most people is I’m good at destroying my own best-loved ideas. I knew early in life that that would be a useful knack and I’ve honed it all these years, so I’m pleased when I can destroy an idea that I’ve worked very hard on over a long period of time. And most people aren’t.
[---]
Q: Why is it so hard to overturn entrenched ideas?
A: It’s insane. I’m fixing a lot of insanity. But that’s my standard thing. I don’t know how to do anything complicated. I know how to avoid insanity, even if it’s conventional. That’s all I know. I don’t even try to be smart. I just try and be not insane and pay no attention to the traditions.
You want the architecture to facilitate the world the way it is and the world the way it’s going to be, not the way the world has been, and it’s not very difficult. It’s just the most elementary common sense. But you’ve got to throw away some of the old precedents, which are stupid.
The interesting question is, when things are perfectly obvious and you have a great profession like architecture, why is everybody so massively stupid? And the answer is it’s hard to be reasonable. There are a million tricks the human mind plays on its owner. That’s what causes stupidity. Think of how many times you’ve said to yourself, ‘Why in the hell did I do that?’
It’s just massively stupid. I don’t like massively stupid. Berkshire tries to take the decision-making power, where it’s important, out of the hands of the stupid and put it into the hands of those people that are good at thinking. That’s our secret.
[---]
Q: Someone once asked you what accounts for your investing success, expecting a long complex answer, and you famously replied, “I’m rational.” So how do you define rationality?
A: People who say they are rational [should] know how things work, what works and what doesn’t, and why. That’s rationality. It doesn’t help if you just know what’s worked before, because if you know why, then you’ll be better at it. So rationality is: Across a broad range of disciplines, you know what works and what doesn’t and why.
[---]
Q: But why isn’t Berkshire easier to emulate?
A: We’re talking about very simple ideas of just figuring out the standard stupidities and avoiding them. And I actually collect them!
Some people collect stamps. I collect insanities and absurdities. And then I avoid them, and it’s amazing how well it works, because I’ve gone by [the examples of] all these people that are more talented than I am.
If I had set out to invent more quantum mechanics, I would’ve been an also-ran. I just set out to avoid the standard stupidities, and I’ve done a lot better than many people who mastered quantum mechanics.
And it’s a way for mediocre people to get ahead and it’s, it’s not much of a secret either. Just avoid all the standard stupidities. There are so many of them, and so many brilliant people do it.
[---]
Q: I wouldn’t ask most people this, but I’m sure you won’t mind. What would you want the first paragraph of your obituary to say?
A: Both Warren and I feel it’s our moral duty to be as rational as we can possibly be. A lot of people who are brilliant in some ways tend to make these utterly asinine decisions in other ways. We both tend to collect the asininities of the world in a kind of checklist. And we try to avoid everything on the checklist.
- Charlie Munger, Unplugged
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