1: The minister said, “It’s now time to say something nice about the deceased,” Charlie Munger told the 2007 USC School of Law graduates.
“And nobody came forward, and nobody came forward, and nobody came forward,” he recounts in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
“And finally, one man came up and said, ‘Well, his brother was worse.'”
That’s one way to live our lives.
“Occasionally, you will find a perfect rogue of a person who dies rich and widely known,” Charlie notes. “But mostly, these people are fully understood as despicable by the surrounding civilization.
“If the cathedral is full of people at the funeral ceremony,” he says, “most of them are there to celebrate the fact that the person is dead.”
2: But there’s another way, Charlie explains. “Well, luckily, I had the idea at a very early age that the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.
“It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. We want to deliver to the world what we would buy if we were on the other end.”
When we live this way, we don’t just win money and recognition.
We “win the respect, the deserved trust of the people we deal with,” he explains. “And there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.”
3: We want to be intentional about surrounding ourselves with people we admire and want to be like.
All of us are subject to the control of different authority figures. “Dealing properly with this danger requires both some talent and will,” he notes. “I coped in my time by identifying people I admired and by maneuvering, mostly without criticizing anybody, so that I was usually working under the right sort of people.”
When we trust and admire those we work with, good things happen: “Totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That’s the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic,” he notes.
“If your proposed marriage contract has 47 pages,” Charlie observes, “my suggestion is that you not enter.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Who are the people in my life I love and admire? Who are the people I don’t trust and don’t enjoy being with?
Action: How can I spend more time with the former and reduce or eliminate the latter? Do it.
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