The Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth With Commentary by David Clark is a collection of Charlie Munger’s aphorisms, filled with well-articulated common sense.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Know what you don’t know.
- Gradually extend your circle of competence.
- Be honest.
- Only work with trustworthy people.
Bonus:
- Avoid being an idiot.
- Really smart people can do really stupid things.
Career Advice
- “Three rules for a career: (1) Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself; (2) Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire; and (3) Work only with people you enjoy.”
- Only work with people you trust.
- Know what you don’t know. Admit stupidity and take responsibility. Rub your nose in your mistakes to ensure you never repeat them.
- “Extreme specialization is the way to succeed. Most people are way better off specializing than trying to understand the world.”
Circle of Competence
- Circle of competence: “Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.” Your circle of competence consists of the companies you are capable of analyzing. To build it, start by acknowledging what you don’t know and take steps to address it.
Expanding It
- “There isn’t a single formula. You need to know a lot about business and human nature and the numbers. . . . It is unreasonable to expect that there is a magic system that will do it for you.” Educate yourself in accounting, economics, and the role of the central bank. Then, read the WSJ every day and 300 annual reports per year.
- Know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely—all of them, not just a few.” Being a polymath is a significant advantage in investing.
- Read biographies.
- Read all the time to become wiser. Be a learning machine.
- One step at a time: “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than when you wake up.”
- “It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.” Be like a lawyer constructing a case.
- Don’t waste time worrying about things you cannot change.
- Never multitask.
Patience
- Wait as long as it takes to find worthy stocks to buy.
- Every seven or eight years, there are great opportunities to buy stocks—during crashes! Waiting is the hardest part: just sitting for five years without investing requires great discipline. If the right investment doesn’t come up, keep reading and researching—be patient.
- “Sit on your ass investing. You’re paying less to brokers, you’re listening to less nonsense, and if it works, the tax system gives you an extra one, two, or three percentage points per annum.”
- Financial crises equal opportunity. No one knows when they will come, but be patient—they will. In such situations, cash is king to seize the good deals.
- “I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”
Investing
- When the odds are in your favor, bet heavily.
- “A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.”
- Buy and hold: find great businesses and keep buying when they become undervalued.
- “View a stock as ownership of the business and judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage.”
- Bet on the quality of the business before betting on the quality of the management.
- Don’t follow the herd.
- Diversification is really only for those who believe in efficient markets.
- Don’t trust analysts; their incentives are not aligned with yours.
- Financial companies are impossibly complex. “What looks good from the outside can be seriously rotten from the inside.”
- Stay away from banks unless you have deep insight and know the management is obsessed with operating efficiency, costs, risk management, and avoids large derivative positions and shaky mortgages.
- Trying too hard to minimize your taxes is a common cause of really dumb mistakes.
- “I think that, every time you see the word EBITDA, you should substitute the word ‘bullshit earnings.’ Capital cost of replacement and taxes are very real costs and should be taken into account.”
- Consider whether new technology will benefit or threaten the existing business model.
Business
- Incentives are what drive human behavior.
- “In business, we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and minimizing one or a few variables—like the discount warehouses of Costco.”
- Don’t have a rigid master plan. Be adaptable and ready to adjust as new information comes in.
- When a great business merges with a bad business, it often harms the good business.