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: 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: What do Marcus Aurelius, Cato, Seneca, Thomas Jefferson, James Stockdale, Epictetus, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Washington have in common?  

“They explicitly practiced and studied Stoicism,” writes Ryan Holiday in The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. “We know this for a fact.” 

What exactly does it mean to be a stoic?

Philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a Stoic as someone … continue reading

1: The year was 1863. General Ulysses S. Grant was stuck.

For a year, he and his troops had tried to crack the defenses of Vicksburg. The city sat high on the cliffs of the Mississippi, providing a “stranglehold on the most important river in the country,” writes Ryan Holiday in The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.

Ulysses had attacked Vicksburg head-on. … continue reading