If the cathedral is full of people at the funeral ceremony, most of them are there to celebrate the fact that the person is dead.
The second idea that I developed very early is that there’s no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and such love should include the instructive dead.
Somehow, I picked up that idea, and I’ve lived with it all my life. It’s been very useful to me.
A love like that described by [William] Somerset Maugham in his book “Of Human Bondage” is a sick kind of love. It’s a disease, and if you find yourself with a disease like that, you should eliminate it.
“Without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well,” Munger told a graduating class of law students. “You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know.” (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Another idea, and this may remind you of Confucius, too, is that the acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life.
And there’s a corollary to that idea that is very important. It requires that you’re hooked on lifetime learning. Without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know.
You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.
Consider Berkshire Hathaway, one of the best-regarded corporations in the world. It may have the best long-term, big-assets-involving investment record in the history of civilization.
The skill that got Berkshire through one decade would not have sufficed to get it through the next decade with comparable levels of achievement. Warren Buffett had to be a continuous learning machine.
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The same requirement exists in lower walks of life. I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines.
They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were that morning. And boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
Alfred North Whitehead correctly said at one time that the rapid advance of civilization came only when man “invented the method of invention.” He was referring to the huge growth in GDP per capita and many other good things we now take for granted.
Big-time progress started a few hundred years ago. Before that, progress per century was almost nil. Just as civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.
Charlie Munger (right) with Warren Buffett. “If you watched him with a time clock,” said Munger about Buffett, “you’d find that about half of his waking time is spent reading.” (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
I was very lucky. I came to law school having learned the method of learning, and nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning.
Consider Warren Buffett again. If you watched him with a time clock, you’d find that about half of his waking time is spent reading.
Then a big chunk of the rest of his time is spent talking one-on-one, either on the telephone or personally, with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who trust him.
Viewed up close, Warren looks quite academic as he achieves worldly success.
Another idea that was hugely useful to me was one I obtained when I listened in law school when some waggish professor said, “A legal mind is a mind that considers it feasible and useful, when two things are all twisted up together and interacting, to try to think about one thing without considering the other.”
“Once you have the ideas, of course, you must continuously practice their use.”
And I didn’t try as hard at pretending as would have been prudent. So I gave a lot of offense.
Now, I’m generally tolerated as a harmless eccentric who will soon be gone. But coming up, I had a difficult period to go through.
My advice to you is to be better than I was at keeping insights hidden.
One of my colleagues, who graduated as number one in his class in law school and clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court, tended as a young lawyer to show that he knew a lot.
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One day, the senior partner he was working under called him in and said, “Listen, Chuck, I want to explain something to you. Your duty is to behave in such a way that the client thinks he’s the smartest person in the room. If you have any energy or insight available after that, use it to make your senior partner look like the second-smartest person in the room.”
And “only after you’ve satisfied those two obligations do you want your light to shine at all.”
Well, that was a good system for rising in many a large law firm.
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But it wasn’t what I did.
I usually moved with the drift of my nature, and if some other people didn’t like it, well, I didn’t need to be adored by everybody.
Excerpted from “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” by Charles T. Munger, Copyright 2023 by Stripe Press. All rights reserved.
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