Charlie Munger on Mistakes To Avoid In Life | One of the Greatest Speeches Ever（原声文稿）

In my life, to give another example.

the Mungers would have twice the assets they now had.

If I hadn't made one mistake of omission back in the 1970s, and really stupid.

And I blew an opportunity that would have doubled my president's worth. That is a. normal life.

You get one or two on how things work out.

We all know people that are out married, I mean their spouses are so much better. 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, 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, 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, or I can tell a couple.

of other stories too because you like stories.

Here's an apocryphal story that has very instruct you. A young man comes to visit. Mozart.

and he says, Mozart, he says, I want to write symphonies. Mozart says, how old are. you? And the man said, I'm 23.

Mozart says, you're too young to write symphonies. And 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. What was his life like?

He was bitterly unhappy and he died young. That's the life of Mozart. What the hell. did Mozart do to screw it up?

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 overspend 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 symphony.

The truth of the matter is that not everybody can learn everything. Some. people are way the hell better.

And of course no matter how hard you try, they're always some guy that cheats more. Some guy or gal.

And they might have just so what?

Does any of us need to be the very top of the whole world? It's ridiculous.

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 a normal human will outmunt us to not have very. many.

Now, there's a very confident 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 racetracked 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 a lot of opportunities you're not furnishing.

And my advice to you is to avoid those people and this business of controlling. the costs and living simply.

Warren and I had tiny little bits of money. We always underspent our incomes.

and we invested and if you live long enough you end up rich.

It's not very complicated. 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.

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 that live so long, we're doing pretty well on the new business.

It has potential, and it's fun to do. And 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 Mohegans.