1: “Invert. Always invert.” Charlie Munger loved to quote the great algebraist Carl Jacobi.
Inversion is defined as: “A reversal of position, order, form, or relationship.”
Charlie is telling us the power of “turning the question backward.” Because “many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward” he writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
So that was his approach when he was invited to give a graduation speech at The Harvard School in Los Angeles.
Rather than tell the graduating class how to be happy, he instead told them what they could do to “guarantee misery.”
2: Charlie began by sharing three pearls of wisdom from a prior commencement speech by the longtime Tonight Show host Johnny Carson.
Johnny’s prescription for sure misery included, first: “Ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception.”
Charlie shares: “The four closest friends of my youth were highly intelligent, ethical, humorous types, favored 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.”
He adds: “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. . .
“I have yet to meet anyone, in over six decades of life, whose life was worsened by fear and avoidance of such a deceptive pathway to destruction.”
Second, he warns against envy, which “joins chemicals in winning some sort of quantity prize for causing misery.”
And third, about resentment, he observes: “I cannot recommend it highly enough to you if you desire misery. [The British writer Samuel] Johnson spoke well when he said that life is hard enough to swallow without squeezing in the bitter rind of resentment.”
3: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about. Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations. On Fridays, to begin 2025, I will share some of Charlie’s wit and wisdom.
Charlie then adds his own advice: If we want to be miserable, we can begin by being unreliable.
“Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do,” he recommends. “If we will only master this one habit, we will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all our virtues, howsoever great.”
He adds: “While quantum mechanics is unlearnable for a vast majority, reliability can be learned to great advantage by almost anyone.”
So, if we are to be miserable, we must avoid reliability!
Next, he suggests learning “everything we possibly can from our own experience, minimizing what we learn vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others, living and dead.
“This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.”
If we want to be miserable, Charlie suggests we establish a “rule of not learning from the best work done before ours. The prescription is to become as non-educated as you reasonably can.”
He then shares a little history: “There once was a man who assiduously mastered the work of his best predecessors, despite a poor start and very tough time in analytical geometry. Eventually, his own work attracted wide attention, and he said of his 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.'”
His final lesson in our efforts to be miserable is to refuse to process new and disconfirming information, quoting Philip Wylie, who said, “You couldn’t squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn.”
His counter-example is Charles Darwin, whose “working method 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.”
If we minimize objectivity, we also successfully negate Albert Einstein, who “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.”
Looking back on this talk twenty years later, Charlie shares: “I would not revise a single idea.”
More next week!
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Reflection: What stands out here? What can I apply from Charlie’s suggestions on how to be miserable?
What did you think of this post?
