Munger on Learning

“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 when they got up, and boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

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

“You've got to have models in your head, and you've got to array your experience — both vicarious and direct — on this latticework of models.”

“You may say, 'My God, this is already getting way too tough.' But, fortunately, it isn't that tough — because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person.”

“I have a name for people who went to the extreme efficient market theory — which is 'bonkers.' It was an intellectually consistent theory that enabled them to do pretty mathematics. So I understand its seductiveness to people with large mathematical gifts. It just had a difficulty in that the fundamental assumption did not tie properly to reality.”

“I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.”

Widely repeated; we could not trace it to a specific verified interview.

“You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely — all of them, not just a few.”

From the 1996 Stanford talk in the Almanack — not the 1994 USC speech it is often attributed to.

“I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”

Reliably reported from 2015 Daily Journal meeting notes rather than an official transcript.

“People calculate too much and think too little.”

Genuinely his and stably worded; the exact meeting and year are not pinned.

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”

Consistently attributed to the Almanack; the original occasion is not pinned.

“The idea of rubbing one's nose on purpose is very good for civilization.”

Prompted by Johnson & Johnson's habit of post-morteming its own acquisitions — 'rubbing one's nose' means confronting your own decisions. The '[in your own mistakes]' often added online is not in his actual words.

“My second prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead.”

Delivered ironically — an inverted 'prescription for misery.' The real point is the opposite: do learn vicariously from others, living and dead.

“Any year that passes in which you don't destroy one of your best loved ideas is a wasted year.”

His own formulation of a Darwin-style habit of destroying cherished ideas.

“I am very good at learning things from dead people. That's what everybody should learn.”

A 2023 restatement of his lifelong 'learn from the eminent dead' theme.

“You can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.”

“I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart.”

“I came to the psychology of human misjudgment almost against my will. I rejected it until I realized that my attitude was costing me a lot of money, and reduced my ability to help everything I loved.”

From Bevelin's 'Seeking Wisdom' (which Munger read and authorized); wording approximate.

“If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands.”

“If there's any secret to Berkshire, it's the fact that we're pretty good at ignorance removal. And the nice thing about that is we have a lot of ignorance left to remove.”

Right after: 'We were pretty damn stupid when we bought See's — just barely smart enough to buy it.'

“We're too soon old and too late smart. That's everybody's problem, and the reason we're too late smart is the stupid ideas we already have, we can't get rid of.”

He credits 'too soon old and too late smart' to an old German saying; the gloss is his own.

“It's very hard to teach business based on opportunity cost. It's much easier to teach the capital-asset pricing model, where you could just punch in numbers and out come numbers. And therefore, people teach what is easy to teach, instead of what is correct to teach.”

“Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhabit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

“So if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries. You don't have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it's not that hard to do.”

“I want economics to pick up the basic ethos of hard science, the full attribution habit, but not the craving for an unattainable precision that comes from physics envy.”

“It's been amazing that both corporate finance and investment management courses, as taught in the major universities — we would argue it's at least 50 percent twaddle, and yet these people have very high IQs.”

“The system that nature uses to get smart is kind of unpleasant for the people who are losing.”

On evolution by elimination.

“The game of life is a game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.”

“Walton invented practically nothing. But he copied everything anybody else ever did that was smart — and he did it with more fanaticism and better employee manipulation. So he just blew right by them all.”

“The one thing that we did that's worked best of all is we were always dissatisfied with what we already knew and we always wanted to know more. … It's what we kept learning that made it work, and I don't think that will ever stop.”

Two non-adjacent sentences joined.