No. 553 — December 3, 2023 — Read on FS — Free Version

FS

"I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes."

— Source: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

Insight(s)

In memory of one of my heroes, Charlie Munger, who passed away this week.

1.

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

— Charlie Munger

2.

"You should never, when faced with one unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase into two or three because of a failure of will."

— Charlie Munger

3.

"Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve."

— Charlie Munger

4.

"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."

— Charlie Munger

5.

"Take a simple idea, and take it seriously."

— Charlie Munger

6.

"I 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."

— Charlie Munger

7.

"I didn't get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities."

— Charlie Munger

8.

"I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don't want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. I don't play in a game where other people are wise and I am stupid. I look for a game where I am wise, and they are stupid. And believe me, it works better. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich."

— Charlie Munger

9.

"I am not smart enough to make decisions with no time to think. I make actual decisions very rapidly, but that's because I have spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly reading."

— Charlie Munger (lightly edited)

Tiny Thought

Everything today is geared towards immediate optimization.

Itineraries are supposed to be packed. Answers are supposed to be immediate. Debt is supposed to be as much as you can get. Cash that’s not working for you is a waste. You're not busy enough if you only work on one or two things.

If there are no great opportunities, you are supposed to fill your time with average ones. And when your time is filled with average opportunities, there is no room for exceptional ones.

There is no slack. We have no time to think. No buffer if things go wrong. No time to explore.

What people miss is that short-term optimal is rarely long-term optimal. This is something hindsight teaches, but foresight often misses.

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TKP

"Kobe and I would talk about this when I was building the Black Mamba [persona] with him, and he often said he just had no way of relating to people who just didn’t want to be par excellence, just the best at their thing. He had a hard time relating to them. I would say I was similar, but then after I matured… And I still have to watch myself, Shane, because it is such an ego response to make myself probably feel good about myself, to judge someone else because they’re not getting some sort of result or I perceive them as being average. Because [there are] many reasons why someone might be getting average results."

— Source: Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity

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Thanks for reading,

— Shane

P.S. These photos.