#peterdkaufman

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Quickly Eliminate the Big Universe of What Not to Do, Follow up with a Fluent, Multidisciplinary Attack on What Remains, Then Act Decisively When, and only When , the Right Circumstances Appear.

Peter D. Kaufman ,in summarizing Charlie Munger’s approach in Poor Charlie’s Almanack

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You must have the confidence to override people with more credentials than you whose cognition is impaired by incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is obviously present. But there are also cases where you have to recognize that you have no wisdom to add-and that your best course is to trust some expert. In effect, you've got to know what you know and what you don't know. What could possibly be more useful in life than that?

Charlie Munger to Stanford Law school, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

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Here are four more prescriptions from Munger (for misery): First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit, you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great. If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for you.... My second prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.... My third prescription to you for miserybis to go down and stay down when you get your first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life. Because there is so much adversity out there, even for the lucky and wise, this will guarantee that, in due course, you will be permanently mired in misery.....My final prescription to you for a life of fuzzy thinking and infelicity is to ignore a story they told me when I was very young about a rustic who said, “I wish I knew where I was going to die, and hen I’d never go there.” Most people smile (as you did) at the rustic’s ignorance and ignore his basic wisdom. If my experience is any guide, the rustic’s approach is to be avoided at all cost by someone bent on misery. To help fail, you should discount as mere quirk, with no useful message, the method of the rustic, which is the same one used in Carson’s speech. What Carson did was to approach the study of how to create X by turning the question backward , that is, by studying how to create non-X....Finally,minimizing objectivity will help you lessen the compromises and burden of owning worldly goods because objectivity does not work only for great physicists and biologists...Therefore, if you interpret being true to yourself as requiring that you retain every notion of your youth, you will be safely underway, not only toward maximizing ignorance, but also toward whatever misery can be obtained through unpleasant experiences in business.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

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A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.

Charlie Munger

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Question: "All kinds of people ask me for some foolproof system for achieving financial security or saving for their retirement. I try to dodge those questions." [Editor: "But this time, Charlie, we're not going to let you dodge it." Answer: "Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. THIS IS SUCH A NO-BRAINER."

Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

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first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang togerher on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

Charlie Munger to The University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, April 14, 1994

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You are neither right or wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.

Benjamin Graham