Charlie Munger on Mistakes to Avoid in Life. | [C:C.M Ep.34]

[Music] in my life to give another example the mongers would have twice the assets they now have if i hadn't made one mistake of omission back in the 1970s and really stupid and i got i blew an opportunity would have doubled my present net worth that is a normal life you get one or two how things work out it's the basis we all know people are outmarried but i mean their spouses are so much better i think what a good decision that was for them and what a lucky decision way more important than money and a lot of them did it when they were young just they stumbled into it now you don't have to stumble into it you can be very careful a lot of people are wearing signs danger do not touch and people just charge right ahead that's a mistake well you can laugh but it's still a horrible mistake and it's been fun for the people on this board to know one another and work on these oddball things and to handle life's vicissitudes of course it's very peculiar that we're so old i mean imagine a place where gary wilcox is one of the young men and his wife is still a golf champion but that's not because she's good when she's old i mean yeah it's it's an amazing group and that's an interesting example too imagine being as old and as prepared as i am and having a pretty good time how does that happen well you that is another story i used a couple of other stories too because you like stories here's an apocryphal story that is very instructive a young man comes to visit mozart and he says mozart and he says i want to write symphonies and mozart says how old are you man i'm 23. the most it says you're too young to write symphonies he says but mozart he says you were writing symphonies when you were 10 years old mozart says yes but i wasn't asking other people how to do it now there's another mozart story here's the greatest musical talent maybe that ever lived and what was his life like well he was bitterly unhappy and he died young that's the life of mozart what the hell did mozart do to screw it up make himself well he did two things that are guaranteed to create a lot of misery he overspent his income scrupulously that's number one that is really stupid and the other thing was he was full of jealousies and resentments if you'll spend over spend your income and be full of jealousy and resentments you can have a lousy unhappy life and die young all you've got to do is learn from mozart you can also learn from that young man who was asking mozart how to write somebody the truth the matter is that not everybody can learn everything some people are away the hell better and of course no matter how hard you try they're always some guy that achieves more some guy or gal and my answer is so what do it does any of us need to be the very top of the whole world it's ridiculous and another thing that people do like bear guard is amazing is they build these enormous mausoleums i think they figure they want people to walk by that mausoleum and say gosh i wish i were in there anyway you can see we've had some fun as we go along and it's worked so well but if you actually figure out how many decisions were made in the history of the daily journal corporation or the history of berkshire hathaway it wasn't very many per year that were meaningful it's a game of being there all the time and recognizing the rare opportunity when it comes and recognizing that the normal human allotment is to not have very many now it's a very competent bunch of people who sell securities who act as though they've got an endless supply of wonderful opportunities those people are the equivalent of the racetrack tout they're not even respectable it's not a good way to live your life to pretend to know a lot of stuff you don't know and pretend to furnish you a lot of opportunities you're not furnishing and my advice to you is avoid those people but not if you're running a stock brokerage firm you need them but it's not the right way to rank make money and this business of controlling the costs and living simply and that was the secret how much my warren and i had tiny little bits of money we always understood our incomes and we invested and well you know you live long enough you end up rich it's not very complicated and and now there is a part of life which is how do you scramble out of your mistakes without them costing too much and we've done some of that too and if you look at berkshire hathaway think of its founding businesses a doom department store a doom new england textile company a doom trading stamp company out of that came berkshire hathaway now we handled those losing hands pretty well when we bought into them very cheaply but of course the success came from changing our ways and getting into the better businesses and it isn't that we were so good at doing things that were difficult we were good at avoiding things that were difficult finding things that are easy by the way when we bought the daily journal that was easy what we're doing now in this software business is difficult but due to the accident of these good associations and the fact that these old colleagues have lived so long we're doing pretty well in the new business it has potential and it's fun to do and and uh how many declining newspapers have hundreds of millions of marketable securities lying around and a new business with some promise we're like the last of the mohigans oh he's giving it to somebody important well i'll take some questions now i you

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Id: QSGz4Y8CP2I

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020