Charlie Munger Shares His 5 Tips for a Successful Work Life
Before his passing, legendary Berkshire Hathaway vice chair Charlie Munger shared his advice for thriving in your career and your life.
By Charlie Minger
The following article was written by Charlie Munger before his death on November 28. His book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack publishes December 5.
As I approach my 100th birthday, I’m often asked for advice on how to succeed in business and in life. I have a pretty standard set of advice that applies to most circumstances. It’s worked pretty well for me, and it’ll work pretty well for any other person who uses my methods. I don’t claim that they’re perfect for everybody, but I think many of them contain universal values and can’t-fail ideas.
BE RELIABLE
Reliability is essential for progress in life. While quantum mechanics is unlearnable for a vast majority, reliability can be learned to great advantage by almost anyone. In short: Always do faithfully what you have engaged to do.
If you’re unreliable, it doesn’t matter what your virtues are, you’re going to crater immediately. So, faithfully doing what you’ve engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct.
Indeed, I have often made myself unpopular on elite college campuses by pushing this reliability theme. What I say is that McDonald’s is one of our most admirable institutions. Then, as signs of shock come to surrounding faces, I explain that McDonald’s, in providing first jobs to millions of teenagers over the years, has successfully taught most of them the one lesson they most need: to show up reliably for responsible work. Then I usually go on to say that if the elite campuses were as successful as McDonald’s in teaching sensibly, we would have a better world.
INVERT, ALWAYS INVERT
When presented with a difficult problem, the most successful people think it through forward and backward. If you turn problems around in reverse, you often think better. In fact, many of the world’s hardest problems are best solved when addressed backward. If you want to help someone, the question you should consider asking is not “How can I help them?” Instead, you should ask, “How can I hurt them?” You find what will do the worst damage and then try to avoid it.
Look at the game of bridge. The best players think, “How can I take the necessary winners?” But they think it through backward, too: “What could possibly go wrong that could cause me to have too many losers?” Both methods of thinking are useful. So, in the game of life, get the needed models into your head and think it through forward and backward. What works in bridge will work in life.
TAKE NOTE OF THE BEST WORK DONE BEFORE YOU
You can’t learn everything from your own experience. The most effective way to become successful is to learn from the best work done before yours. Maximize what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others, living and dead. There are lessons worth billions in a $30 history book.
Nobody expects you to know everything about everything. I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.
I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine, would you mind if I give the lecture in Munich and you sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” So the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics, after which a physics professor stood up and asked a question of extreme difficulty. But the chauffeur was up to it. He said, “I’m surprised that a citizen of an advanced city like Munich is asking so elementary a question, so I’m going to ask my chauffeur to respond.”
The reason I tell this story is not to celebrate the quick-wittedness of the chauffeur. In this world, I think there are two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, that of the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. Then, we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned to prattle the talk. But in the end, what they’ve got is chauffeur knowledge masquerading as real knowledge. Your challenge will be to understand the difference and learn as much as you can from the people with Planck knowledge.
Recall the words of the great Sir Isaac Newton. When his work began attracting wide attention, he said, “If I have seen a little farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
TAKE NOTE OF THE WORST WORK DONE BEFORE YOU
Just as important is to pay attention to the failures of those before you. You can see the results of not learning from others’ mistakes by simply looking around you. How little originality there is in the common disasters of mankind: drunk driving deaths, business failures through repetition of obvious mistakes made by predecessors, various forms of crowd folly, and so on.
I don’t have any way of learning or behaving so you won’t make a lot of mistakes. But you can learn to make fewer mistakes than other people—and how to fix your mistakes faster when you do make them.
There’s no way that you can live an adequate life without making many mistakes. Part of what you must learn is how to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds. Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand.
PREPARE FOR HARDSHIPS
One thing we all must cope with is that life is very likely to provide terrible blows, unfair blows. Some people recover and others don’t. But every mischance in life, however bad, provides an opportunity to learn something useful. Instead of becoming immersed in self-pity, the most successful among us utilize each terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
You may well say, “Who wants to go through life anticipating trouble?” Well, I did. I’ve gone through a long life anticipating trouble. And here I am now, well along in my 100th year. It didn’t make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came. It didn’t hurt me at all. In fact, it helped me.
I hope these ruminations of an old man are useful to you. In the end, I think of John Bunyan’s words in Pilgrim’s Progress: “My sword I leave to him who can wield it.”