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Learning and growth

Charlie Munger

Invert

Charlie Munger (Contemporary · 1924–2023) — Invert.

Learning and growthThe industrial ageInvert

What actually happened?

Invited to give a commencement address at Harvard Law, he told the graduating class he would explain how to guarantee a miserable life, and then listed the ways: unreliability, envy, resentment, learning only from your own experience, giving up after the first reverse. It is the method demonstrated on itself. If you knew where you were going to die, he liked to say, you would simply never go there.

Invert, always invert

There are countless routes to a thing going well and only a handful of ways it reliably goes wrong. Listing the failure modes and avoiding them is a shorter, more tractable problem than working out how to win.

Nobody could say what would make the launch succeed. Everyone could name the three things that would sink it, and two were already true.

One hammer is not enough

To a man with only a hammer everything looks like a nail. He collected models from other fields — compounding from mathematics, critical mass from physics, selection from biology, the standard biases from psychology — because a problem rarely arrives in the shape of your one discipline.

The retention problem was not a product problem. It was a queueing problem, and nobody in the room had ever been handed that model.

Look at the incentive first

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. To understand why a system produces what it produces, do not start with what people say they value; start with what they are paid, promoted and forgiven for.

The review process rewarded shipping. Nobody was ever promoted for deleting a feature, so the surface grew every year and nobody had decided that.

How do I use it today?

Take the plan you are about to commit to and spend twenty minutes writing only the ways it fails. Then check how many are already true. That list is more useful than the plan.

Deep read

Invert, always invertStudy the ways it dies firstThe failure modes are a short list; the ways to win are notOne hammer is not enoughThe danger is the skill, not the ignoranceYour discipline came with a viewfinder attached

Read alongside

Warren BuffettSame desk for fifty years: Buffett holds the temperament, Munger supplies the checklist of ways to be wrong. Elon MuskReduce to physics, or carry many borrowed models at once — two opposite cures for the same blindness. Kazuo InamoriTwo versions of character as a business input. Munger treats reliability as a way of not being stupid; Inamori puts it in the formula as the one factor that can turn the answer negative.

Further

Warren Buffett Han Feizi John Boyd Elon Musk Influence Benjamin Franklin Ray Dalio Benjamin Graham Peter Lynch Jim Simons George Soros Richard Feynman Socrates Thinking, Fast and Slow Thinking in Systems Bruce Lee Albert Einstein

Lines to keep

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage we have got by trying to be consistently not stupid.

Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.