• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin ($)

• Capital (El Capital) by Karl Marx ($)

• David Sarnoff: A Biography by Eugene Lyons ($)

• Einstein by Walter Isaacson ($)

• Go East Young Man by Justice William Douglas ($)

• Great Short Biographies by B. H. Clark ($)

• Harvard Classics: The Five Foot Shelf of Books (~1910 version, I believe) ($)

• Influence by Cialdini ($)

• Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War by Brandon Brown ($)

• The Federalist by Jacob Cooke ($)

• The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice by Kevin McAuliffe ($)

• The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page by Burton Hendrick ($)

• Will Rogers: The Man and His Times by Richard Ketchum ($)

($’s above take you to Amazon, which are affiliated links, meaning if you purchase them there I get a small commission)

1. “All I want to know is where I am going to die so I’ll never go there.”

   • I’ve always enjoyed this as just a fun quote to steal and use when talking alternative paths forward / decision making; I also wrote in more detail about the concept — called inversion — here, in Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots.

2. “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”

3. “There is no better teacher than history in determining the future… There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.”

4. “There’s no way that you can live an adequate life without many mistakes. In fact, one trick in life is to get so you can handle mistakes. Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke.”

5. “It’s a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.”

   • There are people that force this in a disingenuous way; however, it is rare that I meet anyone who is both successful and of the kind of character I respect that speaks often of their successes.

6. “When you know you have an edge, you should bet heavily. When you know you’re right. Most people don’t teach that in business school.“

   • Mistakes of omission — not doing something and thus missing an opportunity — tend to be most painful. Not betting enough in situations where I knew I should go all in — whether that be with dollars, effort, focus, etc. — are the mistakes I think about most.

7. “Even bright people are going to have limited, really valuable insights in a very competitive world when they’re fighting against other very bright, hardworking people. And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times.”

8. “The big money is not in the buying or selling, but in the waiting.”

9. “The beauty of it is that you only have to get rich once. You don’t have to climb this mountain four times. You just have to do it once. “

   • Rich is relative to your own expectations, and frugality creates freedom.

10. “And so my lesson to all of you is conduct your life so that you can handle the 50% decline with aplomb and grace. Don’t try to avoid it. It will come. In fact I would say if it doesn’t come, you’re not being aggressive enough.”

11. “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

    • So, sounds like there is hope for me yet!

12. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

13. “If all you have is a hammer, the world looks like a nail.”

14. “To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.”

15. “I always say the same thing: realistic expectations, which is low expectations. If you have unreasonable demands on life, you’re like a bird that’s trying to destroy himself by bashing his wings on the edge of the cage. And you really can’t get out of the cage. It’s stupid. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.”

16. “People need to ask, ‘How do I play the hand that has been dealt me?’ The world is not going to give you extra return just because you want it. You have to be very shrewd and hard working to get a little extra. It’s so much easier to reduce your wants. There are a lot of smart people and a lot of them cheat, so it’s not easy to win.”

17. “Well, if I had to name one factor that dominates human bad decisions? It would be what I call denial. If the truth is unpleasant enough, people’s minds play tricks on them and they think it isn't really happening.”

18. “We all start out stupid and we all have a hard time staying sensible. You have to keep working at it.”

19. “I just try and avoid being stupid. I have a way of handling a lot of problems. I put them on what I call my too-hard pile and I just leave them there. I’m not trying to succeed in my too-hard pile.”

    • When it comes to thinking about investment decisions, this has been one of the more useful pieces of advice I’ve stolen from Munger in the last ten years. Somethings are just too hard to figure out — so move on and focus on others.

20. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”

21. “Competency is a relative concept. What I needed to get ahead was to compete against idiots. And, luckily, there was a large supply.“

22. “So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose.”

23. “What I would say is the single most important thing if you want to avoid a lot of stupid errors is knowing where you’re competent and where you aren’t, knowing the edge of your own competency. And that’s very hard to do, because the human mind naturally tries to make you think you’re way smarter than you are.”

24. “As I always say, the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. That’s just the way it is.”

    • For me, this ties into the idea of relative competency — some people are better than you at some skills. Go spend more time doing the things where you are in the top fifth, and spend less time where you aren’t.

25. “A lot of smart people think they’re way smarter than they are, and therefore they do worse than dumb people, if you ask me.”

26. “However, averaged out, betting on the quality of a business is better than betting on the quality of management. In other words, if you have to choose one, bet on the business momentum, not the brilliance of the manager.”

27. “If you go into a career that’s very tough you’re not going to do very well. And if you go into one where you have special advantages and you like the work, you’re going to do pretty well.”

28. “When I was at Caltech, I took this course in thermodynamics from Homer Joe Stewart. By the way, a lovely human being and gifted beyond compare, and one thing I learned was that no matter how hard I would try, I could never be as good at thermodynamics as Homer Joe Stewart. And I think that is a very useful lesson. I knew what I could do and I couldn’t, and I never even considered trying to compete with the Homer Joe Stewarts in the world of thermodynamics.”

29. “In fact if you look at Berkshire, take out a hundred decisions, which is like two a year. The success of Berkshire came from two decisions a year over 50 years.“

30. “I have a friend who’s a fisherman. He says, ‘I have a simple rule for success in fishing. Fish where the fish are.’ You want to fish where the bargains are. That simple. If the fishing is really lousy where you are you should probably look for another place to fish.”

31. “I’ve made bad business decisions. You can’t live a successful life without taking some, doing some different things that go wrong. That’s just the nature of the game. And you wouldn’t be sufficiently courageous if you tried to avoid every single reverse.”

32. “Another thing of course is life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows, doesn’t matter. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best… your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea.”

33. “Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, [think that] it’s actually you who are ruining your life. It’s such a simple idea. Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.”

    • Another near-and-dear idea that I’ve stolen from Munger and tried to work in my day-to-day life. Whatever reverse I feel like I am experiencing, focusing on how bad I feel never helps. Working to improve the things that are within my control while accepting what I cannot change is the fastest route to extricating myself from the negative siltation. It is easier to just feel bad for myself, so I mess this up more often than not.

34. “If you just take the attitude that, however bad it is in anyway, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can – the so-called ‘iron prescription’ – I think that really works.”

35. “I suggest that every time you find you’re drifting into self-pity, I don’t care what the cause, your child could be dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to improve the situation… It’s a ridiculous way to behave, and when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody else, almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard condition and yet you can train yourself out of it.”

36. “The idea that life is a series of adversities and each one is an opportunity to behave well instead of badly is a very, very, good idea. And I certainly recommend it to everybody in the room. And it works so well in old age because you get so many adversities you can’t fix. So you better have some technique for welcoming those adversities.”

37. “Well it’s a very simple answer, they’re handling it with denial. They have a horrible problem they can’t fix, so they just treat it as nonexistent. This is a very stupid way to handle a problem. Now it may be good when you’re thinking about your own death which you can’t fix and it’s just denial all the way to the end. But in all the practical fields of life, a problem thoroughly understood is half solved or better coped with.”

    • Looking at my own experience making mistakes, denying that there is even a problem and kicking the can down the road ranks up there as a most common cause of error. It is so easy to just not accept that something is wrong — for a few years, that what I did with my health, as discussed above

38. “I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn’t like it; indeed, especially when one doesn’t like it."

39. “Missing out on some opportunity never bothers us. What’s wrong with someone getting a little richer than you? It’s crazy to worry about this…”

40. “In my life, to give another example, the Mungers would have twice the assets they now have if I hadn’t made one mistake of omission back in nineteen 70s. And…really stupid. I blew an opportunity that would have doubled my present net worth. That is a normal life. You get one or two. And how things work out.”

41. “What the hell do I care if somebody else makes money faster? There’s always going to be somebody who is making money faster, running the mile faster or what have you. So in a human sense, once you get something that works fine in your life, the idea of caring terribly that somebody else is making money faster strikes me as insane.”

    • Hard advice to remember, but whenever I’m focusing on putting one foot in front of the other walking towards a better future for my family regardless of how fast others seem to be walking, things seem to work out better than expected in the medium term.

42. “There are always people who will be better at something than you are. You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.”

43. “I think life is a whole series of opportunity costs. You know, you got to marry the best person who is convenient to find who will have you. Investment is much the same sort of a process.”

44. “Everybody uses new technology, but it really helps to have a position that almost can’t be taken away by technology.”

    • With all the inflation-related considerations over the last few years, I am reminded of Warren Buffett’s thoughts on how to defend against inflation as an individual: “The best thing you can do is to be exceptionally good at something. People are going to give you some of what they produce in exchange for what you deliver.”

45. “Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”

46. “Both of us prefer to make our money in association with people of merit.”

    • I recently read a blurb somewhere — I can’t find it now — about how a child’s friend group is more important than the parents’ specific parenting style when it comes to that child’s character and life outcomes (with lots of caveats, I think… for example, the parents’ style will dictate how the child picks friends, I would guess); I think that influence of those you spend time with never stops being a driving force in who you become over time regardless of your current age

47. “Avoid evil.”

48. “The young man knows the rules, and the old man knows the exceptions.”

49. “We don’t train executives, we find them. If a mountain stands up like Everest, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that it’s a high mountain.”

50. “My personal bet is that these democracies will eventually borrow too much and cause some real troubles. I don’t know when.”