Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett’s indispensable partner at Berkshire Hathaway.  He died on the 28th November 2023 just short of his 100th birthday. Charlie was in the background a lot of the time, but there is no doubt that he played a very important role in the success of Berkshire Hathaway.

This month I am just sharing some of the pearls of wisdom that came from the indomitable character, that was Charlie Munger:

On life:

• A majority of life’s errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.
• I would argue that passion is more important than brainpower.
• Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
• It’s remarkable how much long-term people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
• Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.
• The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
• Simplicity has a way of improving performance through enabling us to better understand what we are doing.
• Just because you like it does not mean that the world will necessarily give it to you.
• 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.  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.

On learning:

• In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time.
• I paid no attention to the territorial boundaries of academic disciplines and I just grabbed all the big ideas that I could.
• I always knew from when I was a little boy that the opportunities that were important that were going to come me were few and the trick was to prepare myself for seizing the few that came. This is not an attitude that they have at a big investment council. They think that if they study a million things, they can know a million things.

On investing:

• The big money is not in the buying or in the selling, but in the waiting.
• People calculate to much and think too little.
• We have three baskets for investing: yes, no, and too tough to understand.
• Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.
• A lot of people with high IQ’s are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments.
• 99% of the troubles that threaten our civilisation come from too optimistic accounting.
• Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.
• It takes character to sit with all that cash and do nothing. I didn’t get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.