Life and Investing Principles from an all time Great 

Remembering Charlie Munger

We sadly lost Charlie Munger this past week at the age of 99.  A billionaire, and notable partner of Warren Buffett, Mr. Munger was a role model and teacher about the principles of life, decision making,  investing, and resilience. 

Munger, a billionaire, lived in the same house for 60 years and earned a modest $100,000 salary.   He emphasized the importance of living below your means.  “Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich,” Munger said in 1995. “Not because I wanted Ferraris — I wanted independence. I desperately wanted it.”

But he overcame much adversity in order to get there.  At 31, he was virtually broke, divorced, and burying his 9-year-old son, who had just died of leukemia. At 52, he developed cataracts, and a failed surgery left him blind in one eye. Yet Munger kept forging ahead, helping Buffett turn Berkshire Hathaway into a $784 billion powerhouse. 

Munger often said that reading “all the time” and becoming a “learning machine” drove his success in business, investing, and life and that “if you just keep thinking and reading, you don’t have to work.” 

Other great principles learned from Mr. Munger include: 

1. Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up — become a learning machine. 
2. Read all the time. 
3. Embrace your mistakes. 
4. People who multitask pay a huge price.  
5. Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant. 
6. Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand—you must learn to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds. 
7. It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. 
8. The desire to get rich fast is pretty dangerous. 
9. If you want to succeed in investments, start early and try hard and keep doing it. All success comes that way. 
10. I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time. 

A life well lived, and a legacy and example whom we should all learn from.  RIP Mr. Munger and thanks.

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