Charlie Munger: Harvard School Commencement Speech

Talk 1 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. See The Eleven Talks of Poor Charlie’s Almanack for the full collection.

Key Takeaways

People are often the victim of their vices. And they will die defending those vices and the beliefs that support them. The real trick is to step back and recognize your own bias’ around your vices that you might improve them.

Highlights & Notes

Kyle’s reading layer from Poor Charlie’s Almanack, preserved verbatim. Munger’s text and pulled-in source quotes appear as bullets; Kyle’s own annotations appear as Kyle: callouts.

• While not having significant public-speaking experience, I do hold a black belt in chutzpah, and I immediately considered Demosthenes and Cicero as role models and anticipated trying to earn a compliment like Cicero gave when asked which was his favorite among the orations of Demosthenes. Cicero replied: “The longest one.”
• However, fortunately for this audience, I also thought of Samuel Johnson’s famous comment when he addressed John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost and correctly said, “No one ever wished it longer.” And that made me consider which of all the twenty Harvard School graduation speeches I had heard that I had wished longer. #Public Speaking

  Kyle: Best bar of judgment for a speech.

• While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. And yet, I have yet to meet anyone, in over six decades of life, whose life was worsened by fear and avoidance of such a deceptive pathway to destruction.
  • 2 Nephi 26:22 And there are also secret combinations, even as in times of old, according to the combinations of the devil, for he is the founder of all these things; yea, the founder of murder, and works of darkness; yea, and he leadeth them by the neck with a flaxen cord, until he bindeth them with his strong cords forever.
• “If I have seen a little farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” Isaac Newton #Quotes
• “They that won’t be counseled, can’t be helped.” Benjamin Franklin #Spirit of Humility #Quotes
• Darwin’s result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had. In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: “You couldn’t squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn.” #Confirmation Bias
• Avoiding Life’s Pitfalls à la Rudyard Kipling
  • If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you But make allowance for their doubting too, If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise… If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings-nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much, If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And-which is more-you’ll be a Man, my son!
• Excerpted from the poem “If,” which Charlie has always admired.