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@JimmyBoook

Jun 15

Poor Charlie and Poor Richard Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s partner. Buffett has called him the smartest person he has ever met. Fate bound the two of them together as lifelong partners. Yet if fate had arranged things differently, Munger would still have achieved his own success—just as Buffett would have. Munger’s background is relatively simple. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska. As a boy he worked in the grocery store owned by Buffett’s grandfather. He served in the final stages of World War II, attended the California Institute of Technology, graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, practiced law for a few years, and then quit to devote himself to investing. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Buffett as one of the great super-investors. I have a friend who is a devoted student of Munger’s and once wrote an article about him. I borrowed it, changed the title to “Success Achieved by Wisdom Alone,” and for a time it spread like wildfire. Everyone wants to be that kind of person. Most of them are chasing an illusion. But if such a person truly exists in the world, Munger comes very close. Munger is brilliant, yet he never relies on petty cleverness. The idol he reveres is the American founding father Benjamin Franklin. I have never heard him dwell on Franklin’s many illustrious public achievements. What he quotes instead is the Poor Richard’s Almanack that Franklin created in his youth. Franklin rose from nothing and received little formal education. He single-handedly compiled and wrote Poor Richard’s Almanack. What was his writing like? He would find pieces by authors he admired, imitate their style, and practice repeatedly—refining his craft with the patient diligence of “cutting and polishing jade.” These were not clever shortcuts; they were the clumsy methods of great wisdom. Munger did exactly the same. He gathered his life experiences and investment insights into a single book titled Poor Charlie’s Almanack. Notice that only the name in the middle has changed. It is his tribute to his idol. Many years ago, Munger delivered three speeches at his two alma maters—Caltech and Harvard—each on the theme of “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” Fifteen years later, he wove those three talks into one long article. In the preface he explained why he had gone to the trouble. He freely admitted that he knew nothing about academic psychology. He had integrated, refined, and republished the material simply because these insights had proved extremely useful to him. “Let’s leave something useful for those who come after,” he wrote. “My sword is left for whoever can wield it.” Why did Munger bother to forge his own psychology? Because the world we live in is largely shaped by misjudgment. Whether you wish to avoid the same traps, protect yourself from the misjudgments of others, or even turn those misjudgments to your advantage, you must first know what the common errors are—and second, you yourself must possess a more reliable cognitive framework. He leafed through several psychology textbooks and found them of little practical use. So he took the indigenous route, following Franklin’s example: he did the work himself, hammering out a psychology that actually served him. Charlie Munger’s Life Switches This indigenous method has two defining characteristics. The first is inversion. If you want to know how to succeed, first learn how to fail. Munger does not study success; he studies failure. He extracts lessons from every kind of disastrous decision and inverts them to discover clues for better ones. He likes to say, “Tell me where I’m going to die and I’ll never go there.” It sounds like a joke at first, but it is actually a public declaration of his learning method. The second characteristic is crossing boundaries. Because Munger approaches problems from the negative side, fools and foolishness are precious raw material to him. Fools and foolishness exist everywhere. Wherever they appear, Munger follows and watches carefully. Before long he has crossed industry walls and academic disciplines without even noticing. People are not all alike. Some work through tools—better models, quantification, the pursuit of faster, higher, stronger. Munger is a different sort of person: he works by studying human beings. Another legendary investor, Carl Icahn, belongs to the same school. Icahn is one of the greatest living investors; his record is in no way inferior to Buffett’s, yet his style is entirely different. He buys large stakes, joins boards, fires CEOs, and forces companies to deliver value to shareholders. That is his method. I once heard him lecture on finance to Yale students. He opened with these words: “I don’t understand computers and all that stuff, but I understand people.” To understand people is to understand human nature. Human nature is infinitely complex, so this path is dangerous. Yet human nature has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, so the same path can also be a shortcut. Whether it is dangerous or a shortcut depends on the person walking it. In the game of Go there is a saying: “respond without thinking”—the move is played before conscious thought arrives. This is what happens when mental patterns take over. I simply call them switches: flip one and the reaction follows automatically. In his writings on the psychology of human misjudgment, Munger identified twenty-five such psychological tendencies—mental patterns that shape how people think and decide. Below are the twenty you most need to know. The remaining five appear at the end of the article. The First Switch: IncentiveIt is a super-switch. Munger says we should never underestimate the power of incentives; their importance cannot be overstated. Whenever an incentive can be used, use it—don’t reach for anything else. Franklin made the same point: persuade people with their interests, not with abstract reason. The Second Switch: LovePeople crave love and to be loved. Therefore they overlook the faults of those they love, submit to their will, favor whatever they favor, and will even distort reality to protect the illusion. Love can lift a person to the heights or dash them to the depths. The Third Switch: HateHate is love’s mirror image. For those they hate, people ignore every virtue and everything connected to them, twisting facts with equal abandon. The Fourth Switch: Aversion to UncertaintyPeople dislike doubt and uncertainty; they want to reach a decision at once. This impulse evolved because any prey that hesitated was quickly eaten. The greater the confusion and stress, the stronger the urge to escape uncertainty immediately. The Fifth Switch: ConsistencyPeople dislike appearing inconsistent and feel compelled to make their actions and beliefs line up. This makes habit enormously powerful: it is the shortcut that keeps life coherent. Good habits therefore produce outsized results; bad habits are extraordinarily difficult to break. When this tendency combines with aversion to uncertainty, the result can be disastrous—snap judgments followed by permanent refusal to change. The Sixth Switch: CuriosityHuman curiosity far exceeds that of any other animal. That is one side of the coin. The other side is that curiosity killed the cat. The Seventh Switch: FairnessDo not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. The Eighth Switch: EnvyThis is one of the oldest switches, almost certainly forged by evolution; sibling rivalry runs deeper than rivalry between strangers. The Bible forbids coveting a neighbor’s donkey, yet the prohibition has never worked. Buffett has even said that what moves the world is not greed but envy. The Ninth Switch: ReciprocationWithout the impulse to return favors and avenge wrongs, humans could never have developed large-scale cooperation. Yet the same impulse can be weaponized. Offer someone a small kindness and gratitude arises automatically, opening the door to manipulation. The brain instinctively wants to reciprocate but is poor at keeping precise accounts. Many people have been ruined by this tendency. The Tenth Switch: AssociationEven a superficial connection between two things can color our judgment of both. That is why advertisements are filled with attractive people: we like the messenger, so we like the message. The effect is usually harmless—until it becomes the Persian Messenger Syndrome. The bearer of bad news is executed, and the king never hears bad news again. The Eleventh Switch: Denial of RealityWhen reality is too painful, people simply refuse to see it. The Twelfth Switch: Excessive Self-RegardPeople tend to believe that whatever belongs to them is better and that people who resemble them are more trustworthy. The upside is a feeling of safety; the downside is the formation of closed circles that slowly decay through mutual admiration. Truly great individuals do the opposite: they regularly clean house and let go of what no longer serves them. The Thirteenth Switch: OverconfidenceClosely related to the previous tendency, overconfidence also leads people to overestimate how well they can judge others. The practical result is spending far too much time on interviews when the same hours would be better spent improving the resume. The antidote is simple: stop thinking so much about yourself and start thinking about probability. Before asking whether you can succeed at something, first ask what the historical success rate of that endeavor has been. The Fourteenth Switch: Loss AversionPeople hate realizing a loss so much that they will take enormous risks to avoid it. Imagine a title match between two world Go champions. One player makes a small mistake and falls behind. If he calmly accepts the loss and plays on, the position remains difficult but still playable. Instead he refuses to acknowledge the setback, launches a desperate all-out attack, and is crushed in a single sequence. AlphaGo would never behave this way. Loss aversion is a human switch, not an artificial one. The Fifteenth Switch: Need for BelongingAdolescents are influenced more by their peers than by their families; adults are no different. Under the pressure to belong, ordinary people can commit acts of violence they would once have found unthinkable. When confusion and stress are high, the hunger for belonging becomes especially acute. That is why cults and pyramid schemes begin by isolating their targets from outside relationships. The Sixteenth Switch: BenchmarkingHuman beings are poor at judging anything in isolation; we need a reference point. If an item costs 100 yuan, you may struggle to decide whether it is worth it. But if you know it cost only 50 yuan yesterday, the judgment becomes instant and negative. Never buy the accessories. The entire accessories business is built on exploiting this switch. When the car itself is expensive, the add-ons feel cheap by comparison—yet the dealer’s real margin often hides in those extras. The boiled frog never notices the rising temperature because it only compares each moment to the one before. We excel at relative judgments and remain weak at absolute ones. The Seventeenth Switch: Overvaluing the Easily AvailableMunger likes to quote a lyric: “If the one I love is not beside me, I’ll love the one who is.” A Yale University president and psychologist once observed that, in matters of love, proximity is the single strongest predictor. Rabbits eat the grass closest to their burrow. The Eighteenth Switch: Obedience to AuthorityLeaders appear wise and commanding far more readily than ordinary people, even though, apart from their position, they are ordinary. Reverence for authority is not the trait of any single nation; it is universal. Precisely because this is true, we must be extremely careful about whom we place in positions of power. The Nineteenth Switch: The Need for ReasonsWhen you ask someone to do something, always give a reason. People want to know why. The effect is so strong that merely adding the word “because”—followed by any explanation at all—measurably increases compliance. Psychologists have demonstrated this in many experiments. Try it yourself; the result is immediate and obvious. The Twentieth Switch: Combination EffectsWhen several switches operate together, their power multiplies. Loss aversion combined with the craving for consistency, for example, causes people to keep pouring resources into failing projects until everything is gone. Add obedience to authority, the need for consistency, and the hunger to belong, and you can create cults and terrorist organizations. Looking back at these twenty-five switches, Munger reminds us that they are neither always good nor always bad. They are simply mental shortcuts—evolutionary quick responses that once helped us survive. We must first accept that all human hearts are alike. None of us is exempt; we are all subject to these twenty-five switches. Second, we must remember what they are. The moment we notice that one of them has been flipped inside us, the antidote is already in our hands. Antidotes for the Twenty-Five Switches The remedies are straightforward: At every decision point, run a quick mental check against the list of switches. Awareness itself is already an advantage over blind impulse. Before making any important judgment, impose a cooling-off period. Give the switches time to settle. Think in probabilities rather than certainties. Probability is the great stabilizer of judgment. Always locate the proper reference frame. Compare like with like. Make peace with inconsistency. Changing your mind when new evidence arrives is not a moral failing. Face reality directly, however uncomfortable it may be. Most of these antidotes target specific switches we have already discussed. The single most important step, however, is simply knowing the switches exist. Once you possess that internal monitoring system, the likelihood of being hijacked by any one of them drops sharply. Munger’s great gift was to take these ancient patterns, name them clearly, and hand the map to anyone willing to study it. His sword, as he said, waits for those who can lift it.

Ronit Pereira

@CAronitpereira

Jun 14

Charlie Munger made $500 Million by reading Barron’s Magazine for 50 years. Here’s the story: “I’ve read Barron’s for 50 years and in 50 years, I found only one investment opportunity in Barron’s. Out of which I made $80 Million, with almost no risk.” “It was a Monroe shock absorbers company, trading at $1 and I sold it at $15 but it eventually went to $40. It was a pure cigar butt company.” “The Barron’s said it was cheap stock and so I bought it.” “I gave that $80 Million to Li Lu who turned it to $400-500 Million. So I made that money by reading Barron’s for 50 years and following one idea.” “Now that doesn’t help you very much, does it? I’m sorry but that’s the way it really happened.” 😂 - Charlie Munger. Daily Journal meeting 2017

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