Seneca on Letting the Eminent Dead Guide You
There’s a core part of Charlie Munger’s operating system for life that we adhere to: Learn deeply from the eminent dead. Bathe in the wisdom of great people who lived before you. He calls …
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Don’t Get “Should” Mixed Up with “Is”
The hardest truth to swallow is that the world isn’t really fair, and it isn’t a world you’d necessarily draw up from scratch. It’s not usually what you suppose it should be. None of what’s around us …
How The Four Laws of Ecology Help You Solve Problems
Ecology is the study of relationships and processes linking living things to the physical and chemical environment. Exciting, right? In the 1971 book The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner gives us a …
Stop Crashing Planes: Charlie Munger’s Six-Element System
Before we get to Charlie Munger, let’s chat for a minute. We’ve been noticing a problem lately that you might be familiar with or experiencing yourself: The search for wisdom not actually translating …
Mattering Instinct
Why do we need to matter? It sounds like kind of a hollow question. Of course we matter. But when you really consider it, do you think an ant has decided whether it matters or not? When it …
Important Truths about Population Growth
Garrett Hardin‘s Living Within Limits had a huge influence on how I thought about population. In the book, Hardin convincingly demonstrates the folly of allowing human population to grow …
Learning From Your Mistakes … When You Win
“Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to …
Luck Meets Perseverance: The Creation of IBM’s Competitive Advantage
On Monday October 28, 1929, the stock market took one of the worst single-day tumbles anyone alive might have seen, with the Dow Jones averages falling about 13%. The next day, October 29th, the …
An Important Life Lesson we can Learn from Sailors
A quick yet incredibly important quote today that adds to the wisdom of Andy Benoit and Joseph Tussman. … [W]e should not try to alter circumstances but to adapt ourselves to them as they really …
Avoiding Falling Victim to The Narrative Fallacy
The narrative fallacy leads us to see events as stories, with logical chains of cause and effect. Stories help us make sense of the world. However, if we’re not aware of the narrative fallacy it can …
The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works
In 2007, Charlie Munger gave the commencement address at USC Law School, opening his speech by saying, “Well, no doubt many of you are wondering why the speaker is so old. Well, the answer …
Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform
Understanding how to think things through – to push your mind past the first step – can help you solve problems, avoid problems, and take better actions. The best way to examine the …
Roger Fisher on a Better Way to Negotiate, Part 2
In Part 1 of our series on the best-selling negotiation book Getting to Yes, we covered Roger Fisher’s four-part framework on Principled Negotiation — his “way out” of highly contentious negotiation. …
Ten Words That Forever Change How You View Leadership
“Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.” — Publilius Syrus A calm sea makes it easy for anyone to sail. Only when the storm comes can we discover who knows what they are doing. …
The Road Less Travelled: The Source of Many of the Ills of Mankind
This is a must read. Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where …
Mortimer Adler on Understanding What You Read
One of our goals when reading is to find and elucidate the key sentences in a book. Independent of whether we agree with these key sentences, we first need to digest them — to capture the …