While reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, I came across an article by Farnan Street on Charlie Munger. In Charlie’s words, the article describes How to Live a Life That Really Works — Charlie Munger’s Operation System. Here are some of my key takeaways:
- To get what you want, deserve what you want. Trust, success, and admiration are earned.
- You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
- Learn to love and admire the right people, alive or dead.
- Without lifelong learning, you are not going to do very well. You can only progress when you learn the method of learning.
- Attain fluency on the big multidisciplinary ideas of the world and use them regularly.
- Problems are frequently easier to solve if we turn them around in reverse. Learn to think through problems backwards.
- Avoid sloth and unreliability. Be reliable. Unreliability can cancel out the other virtues.
- Avoid intense ideologies. Always consider the other side as carefully as your own.
- Get rid of self-serving biases, envy, resentment, and self-pity. Self-pity is close to paranoia, and paranoia is very hard to reverse. When you tell the stories of your self-pity, tell yourself: “Your story has touched my heart, never have I ever heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.”
- Allow for self-serving biases in others who haven’t removed them. If you really want to persuade, then appeal to the interest not to reason.
- Avoid being part of the systems that preserve incentives.
- Work with and under people you admire, and avoid the inverse.
- Learn to maintain your objectivity, especially when it’s hard. Checklist routines avoid a lot of errors.
- Concentrate experience and power in the hands of the right people — the wise learning machines.
- You’ll be most successful where you’re most intensely interested.
- Learn the all-important concept of assiduity: Sit down and do it until it’s done.
- Every mischance in life is an opportunity to behave well, every mischance in life is an opportunity to learn something new, and it’s your duty to not get submerged in self-pity but to utilize this terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
- In your own life what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has 47 pages, my suggestion is do not enter. The highest reach of civilization is a seamless system of trust among all parties conc