Charlie Munger on Mastery Quotes

"Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant."

"Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group... then to hell with them."

"If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands."

"It’s not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything."

"You should have a checklist. You need to use it."

"Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward."

"Extreme specialization is the way to succeed for most people."

"You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely – all of them, not just a few."

"We have a passion for keeping things simple."

"The most important thing is to be able to recognize when you are wrong."

"You have to keep learning if you want to become a master of anything."

"If you don't get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."

"You need to have a latticework of mental models in your head. You've got to hang your experience on it."

"Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to maximize every opportunity."

"Mastery is not just about knowing the answers, it's about knowing which questions to ask."

"The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor."

"The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more."

"Developing the habit of mastering the multiple models which underlie reality is the best thing you can do."

"Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean."

"Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up."

"The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win."

"A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments."

"I met the towering intellectuals in books, not in the classroom, which is natural."

"Take a simple idea and take it seriously."

"Being a specialist is a way to get very rich, but being a generalist is the way to stay wise."

"The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want."

"The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better."

"In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time—none, zero."

"You have to reach the point where you’re not just repeating what you’ve been told, but you actually understand the underlying theory."

"You must have models in your head and you must array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models."

"To a man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

"You don't have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long time."

"The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting."