Charlie Munger: USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address

Talk 10 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

We have a moral responsibility to learn as much as possible. The learning that we do should be meaningful and deep, not chauffeur knowledge. We have to manage the impact of that knowledge on those around us and ultimately have a Spirit of Humility to be able to recognize the things we have learned, are learning, and the things we don’t know.

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.

• 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. #Learning
  • “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” Thomas Jefferson
  • Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust. T.S. Eliot
• 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. #Learning
• 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. #Progress Studies #Learning, No Greater Responsibility
• “The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.Alfred North Whitehead
• 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. #Reading #Learning
  • “Adams himself was ‘sober, almost to gloom or sorrow,’ his eyes inflamed, short, bald, slightly corpulent. He was dressed simply, in an olive frock coat, and seemed to be wearing as well a fine layer of learned dust. ‘It was obvious that he was a student,’ Seward wrote, ‘just called from the labor of his closet.’” (DONE) - John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit
  • Diversity of Knowledge — “After attending seven regional conferences in seven states with President Hinckley, Elder Nelson learned what others who traveled with him also observed. Regardless of the destination, he knew something about the history of the area and its people. In the pear-growing area of Medford, Oregon, for example, President Hinckley started a priesthood leadership meeting with a dissertation of fruit trees and how important it was to prune trees in February so that there would be fruit in September. ‘President Hinckley doesn’t expect to be bowed to and prefers to be treated as though he is an ordinary worker,’ said Elder Nelson. ‘But he isn’t ordinary in any respect. He is a multifaceted genius. He understands anatomy and physiology better than any non-physician I have worked with. He talks with builders about finials and mullions and speaks the language unique to their profession. When questions arise that have legal ramifications, he typically says, ‘I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that…’ and them renders an opinion that my lawyer colleagues insist would be a credit to any lawyer. Whether it is medicine or law, education or plumbing, it doesn’t seem to matter. He grasps things quickly, has an amazing breadth of knowledge, and can apply what he knows.’ A man with an insatiable appetite for Learning, President Hinckley not only read widely but found other ways to increase his knowledge and understanding of specialized areas of expertise. After observing him at another regional conference, Elder Nelson reported: ‘One of the security officers assigned to us worked for the local police department. We had time between sessions, and President Hinckley grilled that officer for an hour about their procedures, techniques, and even the equipment they used. I marveled that he knew which questions to ask, each of which was law-enforcement specific.’ Bishop Robert D. Hales added: ‘I have never met an individual who can become so well informed through reading and through contact with people. When he spends an evening at dinner with someone, he leaves knowing something about that individual’s expertise.’” #Conversation #Spirit of Humility (DONE) - Gordon B. Hinckley: Go Forward With Faith
• He wanted to pass this knowledge on to help treat bone cancer. How was he going to do it? Well, he decided to write a textbook, and even though I don’t think a textbook like this sells more than a few thousand copies, they do end up in cancer treatment centers all over the world. He took a sabbatical year and sat down at his computer with all his slides, carefully saved and organized. He worked seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, for a year. Some sabbatical. At the end of the year he had created one of the two great bone tumor pathology textbooks of the world. When you’re around values like Mirra’s, you want to pick up as much as you can. #Don’t Die With Your Music Still in You
• My natural drift, which was toward learning all the big ideas in all the big disciplines, so I wouldn’t be the perfect damn fool the professor described. And because the really big ideas carry about 95% of the freight, it wasn’t at all hard for me to pick up about 95% of what I needed from all the disciplines and to include use of this knowledge as a standard part of my mental routines. Once you have the ideas, of course, you must continuously practice their use. Like a concert pianist, if you don’t practice you can’t perform well. So I went through life constantly practicing a multi-disciplinary approach. #Big Important Ideas #Multidisciplinary Thinking
• “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.” Voltaire
• Even though I was a good poker player when I was young, I wasn’t good enough at pretending when I thought I knew more than my supervisors did. 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. 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. 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. #Apprenticeship
• Another thing to avoid is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind. You see a lot of it in the worst of the TV preachers. They have different, intense, inconsistent ideas about technical theology, and a lot of them have minds reduced to cabbage. (Audience laughs) And that can happen with political ideology. And if you’re young, it’s particularly easy to drift into intense and foolish political ideology and never get out. When you announce that you’re a loyal member of some cult-like group and you start shouting out the orthodox ideology, what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, pounding it in. You’re ruining your mind, sometimes with startling speed. So you want to be very careful with intense ideology. It presents a big danger for the only mind you’re ever going to have. #Compromise
• I have what I call an “iron prescription” that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state. Charlie Munger #Self-Criticism
• Charles Darwin formulated his theories on the transmutation of species in the late 1830’s, but it was not until 1859 that he published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin accepted that any scientific theory proffering an alternative explanation to human origins would be met with widespread prejudice and that therefore prudence dictated he become fully versed every possible counterargument before publishing his ideas. Accordingly, he spent twenty years painstakingly cultivating his theory and preparing for its defense. #Self-Criticism

  Kyle: Why I Believe - Inversion would be “Why wouldn’t I believe?”

• Every time you find you’re drifting into self-pity, whatever the cause, even if your child is dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to help. Just give yourself one of my friend’s cards. Self-pity is always counterproductive. It’s the wrong way to think. And when you avoid it, you get a great advantage over everybody else, or almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard response. And you can train yourself out of it.
• Another idea that I found important is that maximizing non-egality will often work wonders. What do I mean? Well, John Wooden of UCLA presented an instructive example when he was the number one basketball coach in the world. He said to the bottom 5 players, “You don’t get to play - you are practice partners.” The top seven did almost all the playing. Well, the top seven learned more-remember the importance of the learning machine-because they were doing all the playing. And when he adopted that non-egalitarian system, Wooden won more games than he had won before. I think the game of competitive life often requires maximizing the experience of the people who have the most aptitude and the most determination as learning machines. And if you want the very highest reaches of human achievement, that’s where you have to go. You do not want to choose a brain surgeon for your child by drawing straws to select one of fifty applicants, all of whom take turns doing procedures. You don’t want your airplanes designed in too egalitarian a fashion. You don’t want your Berkshire Hathaways run that way either. You want to provide a lot of playing time for your best players.

  Kyle: Are you Self-aware enough and incentivized to acknowledge when you might not be the best player to play? #Incentives

• In this world I think we have two kinds of knowledge: One is Planck knowledge, that of the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. Then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned to prattle the talk. They may have a big head of hair. They often have fine timbre in their voices. They make a big impression. But in the end what they’ve got is chauffeur knowledge masquerading as real knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States. (Audience claps.) You’re going to have the problem in your life of getting as much responsibility as you can into the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people who have the chauffeur knowledge. And there are huge forces working against you.
• Another thing that I have found is that intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn’t excel in anything in which I didn’t have an intense interest. So to some extent you’re going to have to do as I did. If at all feasible, you want to maneuver yourself into doing something in which you have an intense interest. #Career Advice
• “First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.” Epictetus #Public Speaking #Writing
• “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” Epictetus #Spirit of Humility
• “It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.” Epictetus #Spirit of Humility
• In the end, I’m speaking toward the only outcome feasible for old Valiant-for-Truth in Pilgrim’s Progress: “My sword I leave to him who can wield it.” #Don’t Die With Your Music Still in You