Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

In piloting, as in other professions, one great hazard is a bad effect from man-with-a-hammer tendency. We don’t want a pilot, ever, to respond to a hazard as if it was hazard X just because his mind contains only a hazard X model. And so, for that and other reasons, we train a pilot in a strict six-element system: His formal education is wide enou

imitation harder to arrange for competing products. And, because we are going to attach so many expensive psychological effects to our flavor, that flavor should be different from any other standard flavor so that we maximize difficulties for competitors and give no accidental same-flavor benefit to any existing product.

I’d create a course that I’d call Remedial Worldly Wisdom that would, among other useful things, include a fair amount of properly taught psychology. And it might last three weeks or a month. I think you could create a course that was so interesting, with pithy examples and powerful examples and powerful principles, that it would be a total circus.

When you don’t know and you don’t have any special competence, don’t be afraid to say so.

Part of what you must learn is how to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds. Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand.

You must stop slop early. It’s very hard to stop slop and moral failure if you let it run for a while.

Some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments, with territoriality and turf protection and so forth. So if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries.

Of course, when I urge a multidisciplinary approach—that you’ve got to have the main models from a broad array of disciplines, and you’ve got to use them all—I’m really asking you to ignore jurisdictional boundaries. And the world isn’t organized that way. It discourages the jumping of jurisdictional boundaries. Big bureaucratic businesses discoura

The three things I have found helpful in coping with its challenges are: Have low expectations. Have a sense of humor. Surround yourself with the love of friends and family.