Choose Strong
For Tim.
[This was copied from https://jamesclear.com]
Background
Charlie Munger is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. This speech was
originally delivered to the Harvard School on June 13, 1986.
Speech Transcript
Now that Headmaster Berrisford has selected one of the oldest and
longest-serving trustees to make a commencement speech, it behooves the speaker
to address two questions in every mind:
1) Why was such a selection made? and,
2) How long is the speech going to last?
I will answer the first question from long experience alongside Berrisford. He
is seeking enhanced reputation for our school in the manner of the man who
proudly displays his horse which can count to seven. The man knows that counting
to seven is not much of a mathematical feat but he expects approval because
doing so is creditable, considering that the performer is a horse.
The second question, regarding length of speech, I am not going to answer in
advance. It would deprive your upturned faces of lively curiosity and obvious
keen anticipation, which I prefer to retain, regardless of source.
But I will tell you how my consideration of speech length created the subject
matter of the speech itself. I was puffed up when invited to speak. 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 favourite 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 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 wished longer.
There was only one such speech, that given by Johnny Carson, specifying Carson’s
prescriptions for guaranteed misery in life. I therefore decided to repeat
Carson’s speech but in expanded form with some added prescriptions of my own.
After all, I am much older than Carson was when he spoke and have failed and
been miserable more often and in more ways than was possible for a charming
humorist speaking at younger age. I am plainly well-qualified to expand on
Carson’s theme.
What Carson said was that he couldn’t tell the graduating class how to be happy,
but he could tell them from personal experience how to guarantee misery.
Carson’s prescriptions for sure misery included:
1) Ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception;
2) Envy; and
3) Resentment.
I can still recall Carson’s absolute conviction as he told how he had tried
these things on occasion after occasion and had become miserable every time. It
is easy to understand Carson’s first prescription for misery -ingesting
chemicals. I add my voice. The four closest friends of my youth were highly
intelligent, ethical, humorous types, favoured in person and background. Two are
long dead, with alcohol a contributing factor, and a third is a living alcoholic
-if you call that living. 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 I have yet to meet
anyone, in over six decades of life, whose life was worsened by overfear and
overavoidance of such a deceptive pathway to destruction.
Envy, of course, joins chemicals in winning some sort of quantity price for
causing misery. It was wreaking havoc long before it got a bad press in the laws
of Moses. If you wish to retain the contribution of envy to misery, I recommend
that you never read any of the biographies of that good Christian, Samuel
Johnson, because his life demonstrates in an enticing way the possibility and
advantage of transcending envy.
Resentment has always worked for me exactly as it worked for Carson. I cannot
recommend it highly enough to you if you desire misery. Johnson spoke well when
he said that life is hard enough to swallow without squeezing in the bitter rind
of resentment.
For those of you who want misery, I also recommend refraining from practice of
the Disraeli compromise, designed for people who find it impossible to quit
resentment cold turkey. Disraeli, as he rose to become one of the greatest Prime
Ministers, learned to give up vengeance as a motivation for action, but he did
retain some outlet for resentment by putting the names of people who wronged him
on pieces of paper in a drawer. Then, from time to time, he reviewed these names
and took pleasure in noting the way the world had taken his enemies down without
his assistance.
Well, so much for Carson’s three prescriptions. Here are four more prescriptions
from Munger:
First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you
will only master this one habit you will more than counterbalance the combined
effect of all your virtues, howsoever great. If you like being distrusted and
excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for
you. Master this one habit and you can always play the role of the hare in the
fable, except that instead of being outrun by one fine turtle you will be outrun
by hordes and hordes of mediocre turtles and even by some mediocre turtles on
crutches.
I must warn you that if you don’t follow my first prescription it may be hard to
end up miserable, even if you start disadvantaged. I had a roommate in college
who was and is severely dyslexic. But he is perhaps the most reliable man I have
ever known. He has had a wonderful life so far, outstanding wife and children,
chief executive of a multibillion dollar corporation.
If you want to avoid a conventional, main-culture, establishment result of this
kind, you simply can t count on your other handicaps to hold you back if you
persist in being reliable.
I cannot here pass by a reference to a life described as “wonderful so far,”
without reinforcing the “so far” aspects of the human condition by repeating the
remark of Croesus, once the richest king in the world. Later, in ignominious
captivity, as he prepared to be burned alive, he said: “Well now do I remember
the words of the historian Solon: “No man’s life should be accounted a happy one
until it is over.”
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. This prescription is a
sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.
You can see the results of not learning from others’ mistakes by simply looking
about you. How little originality there is in the common disasters of mankind
-drunk driving deaths, reckless driving maimings, incurable venereal diseases,
conversion of bright college students into brainwashed zombies as members of
destructive cults, business failures through repetition of obvious mistakes made
by predecessors, various forms of crowd folly, and so on. I recommend as a
memory clue to finding the way to real trouble from heedless, unoriginal error
the modern saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, well, so much for hang
gliding.”
The other aspect of avoiding vicarious wisdom is the rule for not learning from
the best work done before yours. The prescription is to become as non-educated
as you reasonable can.
Perhaps you will better see the type of non-miserable result you can thus avoid
if I render a short historical account. There once was a man who assiduously
mastered the work of his best predecessors, despite a poor start and very tough
time in analytic geometry. Eventually his own original work attracted wide
attention and he said of that work:
“If I have seen a little farther than other men it is because I stood on the
shoulders of giants.”
The bones of that man lie buried now, in Westminster Abbey, under an unusual
inscription:
“Here lie the remains of all that was mortal in Sir Isaac Newton.”
My third prescription for misery is to go down and stay down when you get your
first, second, third severe reverse in the battle of life. Because there is so
much adversity out there, even for the lucky and wise, this will guarantee that,
in due course, you will be permanently mired in misery. Ignore at all cost the
lesson contained in the accurate epitaph written for himself by Epictetus: “Here
lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favoured
by Gods.”
My final prescription to you for a life of fuzzy thinking and infelicity is to
ignore a story they told me when I was very young about a rustic who said: “I
wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I’d never go there.” Most people
smile (as you did) at the rustic’s ignorance and ignore his basic wisdom. If my
experience is any guide, the rustic’s approach is to be avoided at all cost by
someone bent on misery. To help fail you should discount as mere quirk, with no
useful message, the method of the rustic, which is the same one used in Carson’s
speech.
What Carson did was to approach the study of how to create X by turning the
question backward, that is, by studying how to create non-X. The great
algebraist, Jacobi, had exactly the same approach as Carson and was known for
his constant repetition of one phrase: “Invert, always invert.” It is in the
nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only
when they are addressed backward. For instance, when almost everyone else was
trying to revise the electromagnetic laws of Maxwell to be consistent with the
motion laws of Newton, Einstein discovered special relativity as he made a 180
degree turn and revised Newton’s laws to fit Maxwell’s. It is my opinion, as a
certified biography nut, that Charles Robert Darwin would have ranked near the
middle of the Harvard School graduating class of 1986. Yet he is now famous in
the history of science. This is precisely the type of example you should learn
nothing from if bent on minimizing your results from your own endowment.
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.”
The life of Darwin demonstrates how a turtle may outrun the hares, aided by
extreme objectivity, which helps the objective person end up like the only
player without blindfold in a game of pin-the-donkey. If you minimize
objectivity, you ignore not only a lesson from Darwin but also one from
Einstein. Einstein said that his successful theories came from: “Curiosity,
concentration, perseverance and self-criticism. And by self-criticism he meant
the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.
Finally, minimizing objectivity will help you lessen the compromises and burdens
of owning worldly goods, because objectivity does not work only for great
physicists and biologists. It also adds power to the work of a plumbing
contractor in Bemidji. Therefore, if you interpret being true to yourself as
requiring that you retain every notion of your youth you will be safely
underway, not only toward maximizing ignorance, but also toward whatever misery
can be obtained through unpleasant experiences in business.
It is fitting now that a backward sort of speech end with a backward sort of
toast, inspired by Elihu Root’s repeated accounts of how the dog went to Dover,
“leg over leg.” To the class of 1986:
Gentlemen, may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming
low.
