1: Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich prides himself on being a contrarian.
“If everyone is in favor of something, I’m probably headed in the opposite direction,” Ron writes in his terrific book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.
“When others are celebrating, I’m worrying, and when others are worrying, I’m looking for the silver lining.”
Does he just enjoy being disagreeable?
Nope. That’s not it.
“It’s … continue reading
1: Growing up, billionaire Charlie Munger learned an important lesson from his father.
His dad was a lawyer. “One of his best friends, Grant McFayden, Omaha’s Pioneer Ford dealer, was a client,” Charlie writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
“He was a perfectly marvelous man, a self-made Irishman who’d run away uneducated from a farm as a youth because his father beat him,” he notes. “So he made his own … continue reading
1: Billionaire Charlie Munger was once asked: What should a young person look for in a career?
“I have three basic rules—meeting all three is nearly impossible, but you should try anyway,” he writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger.
Rule #1: Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself.
Rule #2: Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire.
Rule #3:… continue reading
1: Sometimes life is going to be hard, Charlie Munger tells us.
“Another thing to cope with is that life is very likely to provide terrible blows, unfair blows,” he writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger.
“Some people recover and others don’t,” he observes.
So how should we deal with “life and its various passages [which] can be hard, brutally hard”?
Charlie … continue reading
1: Let’s say our goal is to help India.
“The question we should consider asking is not ‘How can I help India?’ billionaire Charlie Munger writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger.
“Instead, we should ask, ‘How can I hurt India?’ We find what will do the worst damage and then try to avoid it.”
This is the power of thinking backward and … continue reading
1: Billionaire Charlie Munger, the longtime vice chairman and “right-hand man” to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, was well known for his fiercely independent thinking.
He took pleasure in rejecting the “wisdom of the herd” and going his own way. Regardless of what others thought or what they might be doing.
Yet, equally important, although perhaps not as well known, was Charlie’s willingness to change his mind when … continue reading
1: The good news?
“Every person is going to have a circle of competence,” Charlie Munger writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, the Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger.
The bad news? “It’s going to be very hard to enlarge that circle,” Charlie observes.
Until his passing in 2023 at the age of 99, Charlie served as Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, founded by Warren Buffett. Berkshire is … continue reading
1: Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors in history. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is valued at more than $1 trillion.
His business partner and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger describes what Warren tells business school students about his approach to investing: “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches, representing all … continue reading
1: There are currently eight companies worth over $1 trillion.
Six are technology companies. The seventh is Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, which some consider a technology company.
The eighth trillion-dollar company is Berkshire Hathaway.
“One of these things is not like the other,” goes the saying.
Berkshire Hathaway was led for many years by Chairman Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger until he died in 2023 at … continue reading
“To a man with only a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.” -Proverb
1: B. F. Skinner was a renowned Harvard psychology professor.
He “may have been the best-known psychology professor in the world,” Charlie Munger writes in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger.
The reason for his reputation? He proved that “incentives are superpowers” by conducting experiments using … continue reading
