Your mind grows stronger or weaker each day, depending on how you use it.
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger built their extraordinary success on a foundation of continuous learning. They showed consistent learning compounds, building understanding, and multiplying opportunities over time.
Consider how Munger’s fascination with psychology led him to spot cognitive biases decades before they became mainstream in business thinking. This insight helped Berkshire avoid common investment traps and identify opportunities others missed.
Their example offers valuable lessons about turning information into insight. Let’s explore how deliberate learning, driven by real curiosity, can help you build deeper understanding and spot opportunities others miss. I call it the Buffett Formula.
The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
Charlie Munger
Reading Powers The Mind
Warren Buffett spends 80% of his working day reading and thinking. When asked how to get smarter, he held up a stack of papers and gave simple advice: read 500 pages weekly. Knowledge, he explained, compounds like interest.
His partner Charlie Munger shares this habit – they’re known for spending more time reading than perhaps any other business partnership.
Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.
Charlie Munger
This approach works. Todd Combs took Buffett’s advice seriously, tracking his daily reading pages. He now works alongside Buffett, having turned dedicated reading into career-changing insight.
The Omaha World-Herald writes:
Eventually finding and reading productive material became second nature, a habit. As he began his investing career, he would read even more, hitting 600, 750, even 1,000 pages a day.
Combs discovered that Buffett’s formula worked, giving him more knowledge that helped him with what became his primary job—seeking the truth about potential investments.
The method is available to anyone. But, like compound interest, it only works if you start and stick with it.
In Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed, Buffett comments to author Michael Eisner:
Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action. And Charlie—his children call him a book with legs.
Continuous Learning
Eisner continues:
Maybe that’s why both men agree it’s better that they never lived in the same city, or worked in the same office. They would have wanted to talk all the time, leaving no time for the reading, which Munger describes as part of an essential continuing education program for the men who run one of the largest conglomerates in the world.
“I don’t think any other twosome in business was better at continuous learning than we were,” he says, talking in the past tense but not really meaning it. “And if we hadn’t been continuous learners, the record wouldn’t have been as good. And we were so extreme about it that we both spent the better part of our days reading, so we could learn more, which is not a common pattern in business.”
Beyond Reading: A Different Kind of Work
Their process isn’t about crunching numbers; it’s about the lost art of thinking. “We don’t read other people’s opinions,” Warren explains. “We want to get the facts, and then think.”
While it’s a convenient excuse to think they were both geniuses, it misses the point that you can improve through continuous learning over a long life.
Munger told a reporter, “Neither Warren nor I is smart enough to make decisions with no time to think. We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we’ve spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly sitting and reading and thinking.”
Taking time to think is one of the two ways to immediately improve the quality of your thoughts.
How to Find Time to Read
Finding time to read is a choice about investing in yourself. As Buffett recounts in The Snowball, Munger discovered this early in his career:
Charlie, as a very young lawyer, was probably getting $20 an hour. He thought to himself, “Who’s my most valuable client?” And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day.
This choice has lasting consequences.
An hour spent on social media and email quickly perishes. You might get a dopamine hit but you don’t get much intellectual growth. However, the same hour focused on reading compounds over time. As Munger puts it: “I have always wanted to improve what I do, even if it reduces my income in any given year.”
The question isn’t whether you have time to read – it’s whether you’ll prioritize long-term growth over short-term distraction. Like Munger, you can choose to be your own most valuable client.
Reading Is Only Part of the Equation
Knowledge without application has little value. As Munger notes: “We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things.”
True understanding requires articulation. In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler puts it directly: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
Test your understanding through explanation. Take an idea you think you grasp and write it out as if teaching someone else. (The Feynman Technique and related methods can help improve retention.)
The Compound Effect of Learning
Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day
charlie munger
It can be hard to appreciate just how much the Buffett formula of dedicated daily reading, independent thinking, and practical application compounds over a long life. But knowing their system isn’t enough – the real insight is that it’s available to anyone willing to prioritize learning over distraction.
Invest an hour a day in yourself and watch what happens. The surprising truth is that getting smarter isn’t about being smarter. It’s about being more consistent than everyone else.
Still Curious? Learn how to think better.