Notes on Charlie Munger’s commencement address: 1. What do you want to avoid in life: Sloth and unreliability. 2. Envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thoughts. It is a ridiculous way to behave. When you avoid it you get a great advantage over everyone else. 3. If you wish to persuade appeal to interest, not to reason. Human self-service bias is so extreme. 4. Cicero is famous for saying: “A man who doesn’t know what happened before he was born goes through life like a child.” The sacrifice and the wisdom and the value transfer that comes from one generation to the next can never be underrated. All of my life I have admired Confucius. I like the idea that there are values and duties that are learned. All of that should be passed onto the next generation. 5. The safest way to try to 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. 6. Think about the type of funeral you want. There is a story about a person who died. The minister said it is now time to say something nice about the deceased. Nobody came forward. After long time a person came up and said, “His brother was worse.” That is not the kind of funeral you want. 7. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It is not just something you do to advance in life. This means you are hooked for lifetime learning. Without lifetime learning you people are not going to do very well. You will not get very far in life based on what you already know. 8. Berkshire Hathaway may have the best long term investment record in the history of civilization. The skill that got Berkshire through one decade would not get it through another decade without Warren Buffet being a continuous learning machine. 9. If you watched Warren Buffett half of all the time he spends is sitting on his ass and reading. The other half of the time he is talking one on one with highly gifted people. 10. I always obeyed the drift of my nature. If other people didn’t like it well I don’t need to be adored by everybody. 11. The way complex adaptive systems work is that problems are usually easier to solve if you turn them around and reverse them. Invert, always invert. 12. Avoid extremely intense ideology. It turns your brain into cabbage. 13. Avoid working with someone you don’t admire and don’t want to be like. 14. Intense interest in a subject is indispensable if you want to excel in it. 15. Life will have terrible blows in it. Horrible, unfair blows. It doesn’t matter. Some people recover and others don’t. The attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought every mischance in life is an opportunity to behave well and learn something. He thought you should utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea.