• Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other side
• If you do this, you’ll earn respect, trust, and love from others

• Acquire new wisdom daily

• You want to be a lifelong learner, only then will you be successful in life
• “You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know”
• Warren Buffett is successful because he is a learning machine and spends about half his day reading

• Study history

• Be aware of what happened before you were alive to get a sense of where things are now
• Cicero is famous for saying, “A man who doesn’t know what happened before he was born goes through life like a child.”

• Learn the big ideas in your domain and other disciplines

• Then interweave them in a mental latticework so you can use them in everyday situations

• Live below your means

• Mozart spent more money than he made and lived a miserable life because of it

• Appeal to interest, not to reason

• If you want to persuade someone, appeal to their interests

• Avoid working under people who you don’t admire or want to be like

• You want to work under people you admire so you follow into their footsteps

• Have a checklist routine -If there’s a process or procedure you perform often, have a checklist of each step to avoid errors

• There are 2 types of knowledge:

• Planck knowledge: people who really understand the subject
• Chauffeur knowledge: people who can just repeat what they have heard

• If you want to become successful in a specific domain, you must have an intense interest in that area

• The only way to be really good in something is to be obsessed with it
• “An intense interest of the subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel”

• Have a lot of assiduity

• Sit down on your ass until you accomplish what you’re set out to do
• Look for partners that have an assiduity mindset

• View every mischance as an opportunity to behave well and learn something

• “Your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion”

• Live a life in which your heroes would be pleased with your actions

• Go through life anticipating trouble and be ready to perform adequately when it arrives

• Be a person people can trust

Mental Models

• Inversion: Reverse the idea or task to get a new perspective on it

• For instance, it’s hard to answer the question “what does it take to be successful in life?” but it’s easy to answer the question “what does it take to fail in life?”

• Iron prescription: Avoid extreme ideologies and don’t be entitled to have an opinion on a subject unless you can state the arguments against your position better than the people do who are supporting it

• Avoid self-serving bias: You should not believe that you are entitled to do whatever you want to do

• Avoid self-pity: Self-pit is disastrous behavior and should be avoided

• Avoid perverse incentives system: Structure your incentives incredibly carefully or you will get undesired outcomes

• Avoid perverse associations: Don’t work for people you don’t admire

• We are all subject to the control of authority figures so try and figure out how to work under people you really admire

Link to FS blog post: https://fs.blog/great-talks/multidisciplinary-approach-thinking-peter-kaufman/

Peter Kaufman is one of the most successful businessmen of our time, and yet few people have ever heard of him. He’s the CEO of Glenair, an aerospace company based in California, and the editor of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book about Charlie Munger.

This speech was to the California Polytechnic State University Pomona Economics Club. The transcript and audio are reproduced here with the permission of Peter Kaufman. As with many “conversational” talks given without notes, it’s better to listen to the audio to pick up on subtleties that won’t come across in the lightly edited transcript. In essence, the talk has a simple takeaway.

Using a true multidisciplinary understanding of things, Peter identifies two often overlooked, parabolic “Big Ideas”: 1) Mirrored Reciprocation (go positive and go first) and 2) Compound Interest (being constant). A great “Life Hack” is to simply combine these two into one basic approach to living your life: “Go positive and go first, and be constant in doing it.”

In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm of Wright & Garrett for $3,300 per year, or $29,851 in inflation-adjusted dollars as of 2010. He had $1,500 in savings, equal to $13,570 now.

A few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena. Munger moved into “dreadful” conditions at the University Club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, “Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it?” The broke Munger replied: “To discourage gold diggers.”

Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son, Teddy, had leukemia. In those days, there was no health insurance, you just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Guerin, Charlie’s friend, said Munger would go into the hospital, hold his young son, and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying.

One year after the diagnosis, in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, and burying his 9 year old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed.

It’s a fair bet that your present troubles pale in comparison. Whatever it is, get over it. Start over. He did it. You can, too. It is The Cinderella Principle.

-Charlie Munger 2008

Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.

• Charlie Munger (2014, WSJ interview)