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The Golden Rule of Success
- ‘The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.’
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Source: USC Law School Commencement Address (MIT 8)
Core Principles for Life
The Golden Rule of Success
- “The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.”
- Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end
- People with this ethos win in life - not just money and honors, but deserved trust
- “There is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust”
- The rogue who dies rich and widely known: at their funeral, most people are there to celebrate that they’re dead
Admiration-Based Love
- “There’s no love that’s so right as admiration-based love”
- Love that includes the instructive debt - learning from those you admire
- Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” depicts a sick kind of love - a disease
- If you find yourself in such a disease, turn around and fix it
Wisdom Acquisition as Moral Duty
Lifetime Learning
- “Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life.”
- You’re hooked for lifetime learning
- “You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know.”
- You advance by what you learn after formal education ends
The Learning Machine
- Berkshire Hathaway’s record would have been impossible without Buffett being a “continuous learning machine”
- The skill that got Berkshire through one decade wouldn’t have sufficed for the next
- “I constantly see people rise in life who were 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.”
The Method of Learning
- Alfred North Whitehead: “The rapid advance of civilization came only when man invented the method of invention.”
- Similarly: “You can progress only when you learn the method of learning.”
- Buffett spends half his time “sitting on his ass and reading”
- A big chunk of the rest is talking one-on-one with highly gifted people he trusts
The Multidisciplinary Approach
Against Professional Tunnel Vision
- A wag defined a legal mind as one that can think about one thing while ignoring another thing it’s twisted up with
- Munger: “That was perfectly ridiculous.”
- “The really big ideas carry 95% of the freight” - not hard to learn them across all disciplines
- Make them a standard part of your mental routines
The Mental Latticework
- You must learn ideas so they’re “in a mental lattice work in your head”
- You must automatically use them for the rest of your life
- “One day you’ll look around and think: I’m now one of the few most competent people of my whole age cohort.”
- If you don’t do this, many of the brightest will live in the middle ranks or shallows
The Danger of Knowing Too Much
- This approach works so well you may find yourself knowing more than experts about their own specialty
- “That is a very dangerous position to be in.”
- You can cause enormous offense by being right in a way that makes someone else lose face
- Solution: Learn to keep your light under a bushel
The Senior Partner’s Advice
- A young lawyer was told: “Your duty is to behave so the client thinks he’s the smartest person in the world.”
- “After that, use any remaining energy to make your senior partner look like the smartest person.”
- “Only after satisfying those two obligations do you want your light to shine.”
Cicero’s Principle Generalized
- Cicero: “A man who doesn’t know what happened before he’s born goes through life like a child.”
- Munger’s generalization: You should know all the big ideas in all disciplines
- Not just enough to pass an exam - must be integrated into your thinking
Inversion: The Power of Thinking Backwards
The Rustic’s Wisdom
- Story: A man wanted to know where he would die so he could avoid going there
- “Problems frequently are easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse.”
- Want to help India? Ask: “What’s doing the worst damage in India? How do I avoid it?”
- These are not logically the same question
Algebra and Life
- Inversion frequently solves problems nothing else will solve
- “Unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems you can’t solve another way.”
What to Avoid
- Sloth and unreliability - If you’re unreliable, it doesn’t matter what your virtues are
- Doing what you’ve engaged to do should be automatic
- Extreme ideology - “It cabbages up one’s mind”
- The Scandinavian canoeists who tackled whirlpools: death rate was 100%
- “A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into. Same is true about a really deep ideology.”
The Iron Prescription for Ideology
- “I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people supporting it.”
- Only when you’ve reached that state are you qualified to speak
- “It isn’t even that hard to do.”
Psychological Biases to Avoid
Self-Serving Bias
- Thinking “the true little me is entitled to do what it wants to do”
- Mozart: became the most famous composer in the world but was miserable most of the time
- One reason: he always overspent his income
- “If Mozart can’t get by with this kind of asinine conduct, I don’t think you should try it.”
Envy, Resentment, Revenge, Self-Pity
- “Disastrous modes of thought”
- Self-pity gets close to paranoia - one of the hardest things to reverse
- The friend who handed out cards reading: “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.”
- “Self-pity is a standard condition. Yet you can train yourself out of it.”
Appealing to Interest vs. Reason
- Ben Franklin: “If you would persuade, appeal to interest, not to reason.”
- The Salomon Brothers general counsel who lost his career by appealing to moral duty instead of self-interest
- The correct approach: “This can erupt into something that will destroy you, take away your money, take away your status.”
- “You want to do it with lofty motives, but you should not avoid appealing to interest.”
Perverse Incentives & Associations
Incentives Control Behavior
- “Incentives are too powerful a controller of human cognition and human behavior.”
- Billable hour quotas in law firms: “I could not have lived under a billable hour quota of 2400 hours a year.”
- That would have caused huge problems
Perverse Associations
- “Avoid working directly under somebody you really don’t admire and don’t want to be like.”
- “It’s very dangerous.”
- We’re all subject to control by authority figures who reward us
- Munger’s solution: “I maneuvered cleverly so I was working entirely under people I admired.”
- “Your outcome in life will be way more satisfactory if you work under people you really admire.”
Objectivity Maintenance
Darwin’s Method
- Darwin paid special attention to disconfirming evidence
- Particularly when it disconfirms something he believed and loved
- “Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required if you’re going to be a correct thinker.”
Checklist Routines
- “Checklist routines avoid a lot of errors.”
- “You should have all this elementary wisdom and then go through a mental checklist in order to use it.”
- “There is no other procedure that will work as well.”
Non-Egality: Getting Power to the Right People
John Wooden’s System
- Wooden (basketball coach) told the bottom five players: “You don’t get to play - you’re sparring partners.”
- The top seven did all the playing
- The top seven learned more because they were doing all the playing
- “When he got to that system, he won more than he’d ever won before.”
The Game of Life
- “Getting a lot of practice into the hands of the people that have the most aptitude to learn”
- “You do not want to choose a brain surgeon for your child among 50 applicants who just take turns doing the procedure.”
- “You want your airplanes designed that way. You don’t want your Berkshire Hathaways run that way.”
Plank Knowledge vs. Chauffeur Knowledge
The Story: Max Planck won the Nobel Prize and gave lectures on quantum mechanics around Germany. His chauffeur memorized the lecture and offered to give it while Planck wore the chauffeur’s hat. A physics professor asked a ghastly question. The chauffeur replied: “I’m surprised in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”
Two Kinds of Knowledge:
Plank Knowledge: People who really know - they’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude
Chauffeur Knowledge: People who’ve learned to prattle the talk - big hair, fine timber in the voice, make a hell of an impression, but don’t really know
“I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States.”
“You’re going to have the problem of getting responsibility into people with Plank knowledge and away from people with Chauffeur knowledge.”
“There are huge forces working against you.”
Interest and Assiduity
Intense Interest Required
- “An intense interest in the subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it.”
- “I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn’t be really good in anything where I didn’t have an intense interest.”
- “Drift into doing something in which you have a natural interest.”
Assiduity
- “I like that word because it means sit down on your ass until you do it.”
- The two partners who created a design-build construction team with this rule:
- “Whenever we’re behind in our commitments to other people, we will both work 14 hours a day until we’re caught up.”
- “Needless to say, that firm didn’t fail. The people died honored and rich.”
Dealing with Terrible Blows
Epictetus’s Attitude
- “Every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well.”
- “Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something.”
- “Your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.”
Epictetus’s Epitaph
- “Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, in the ultimate in poverty, and favored of the gods.”
- He was favored because he became wise and manly
Prudence: Anticipating Trouble
Judge Munger’s Example
- Grandfather was a federal judge for 40 years
- No pensions for widows of federal judges - he underspent his income all his life
- When his uncle’s bank failed, he took a third of his good assets and put them into the bank
- Took the horrible assets in exchange - saved the bank
The Housman Poem
The thoughts of others were light and fleeting, Of lovers meeting, luck or fame. Mine were of trouble, and mine were steady, And I was ready when trouble came.
- “All my life I’ve gone through life anticipating trouble.”
- “It didn’t make me unhappy. In fact it helped me.”
The Seamless Web of Deserved Trust
The Highest Form of Civilization
- “The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.”
- “Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.”
- That’s how an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic
- “If a bunch of lawyers were to introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die.”
For Lawyers
- “You may be rewarded for selling this stuff, but you don’t have to buy it.”
- “In your own life, what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust.”
- “If your proposed marriage contract has 47 pages, my suggestion is you not enter.”
Key Quotes
“The safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want.”
“Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty… You’re hooked for lifetime learning.”
“The really big ideas carry 95% of the freight.”
“Problems frequently are easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse.”
“I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people supporting it.”
“In this world we have two kinds of knowledge: Plank knowledge and Chauffeur knowledge.”
“The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.”
Summary Checklist
- Deserve what you want - Deliver what you’d want to receive
- Learn continuously - Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty
- Think multidisciplinary - Build a mental latticework of big ideas
- Invert problems - Ask what to avoid, not just what to achieve
- Avoid ideology - It cabbages up your mind
- Eliminate self-pity - Train yourself out of it
- Appeal to interest - Not just reason
- Work under people you admire - Avoid perverse associations
- Use checklists - They avoid errors
- Seek Plank knowledge - Not Chauffeur knowledge
- Have intense interest - Required for excellence
- Practice assiduity - Sit on your ass until you do it
- Anticipate trouble - Be ready when it comes
- Build deserved trust - The highest form of civilization
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