Charlie Munger on Planning Quotes

"Preparation is everything. If you are not prepared, you are just going to fail."

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

"Opportunities come to the prepared mind. If you're not ready, you'll miss the fat pitch."

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

"Reliability is the first thing you want in a plan. If you're not reliable, it doesn't matter how high your IQ is."

"You should have a checklist before you make a decision."

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

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

"We have a system that works because we try to avoid the stupid things, rather than trying to be very intelligent."

"A plan that requires perfection is a bad plan because you're never going to get it."

"We have a passion for keeping things simple."

"Most people are too hurried, too stressed. We have a system that works because we avoid the crowd."

"Take a simple idea and take it seriously."

"You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That way of thinking, held over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality."

"You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don't, you're going to lose."

"It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait."

"The best source of a plan is a well-developed set of mental models in your head."

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

"We try to stay within our circle of competence. That is the most important part of our plan."

"I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out."

"Simplicity has a way of improving performance by enabling us to better understand what we are doing."

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

"We don’t want to be the smartest, we want to be the ones who are consistently not stupid."

"We're emphasizing the prevention of mistakes."

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

"Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world."

"Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time."

"We have three baskets for investing: yes, no, and too hard to understand."

"I don't think you can get to be a really good investor without doing a massive amount of reading."

"We don't have a master plan. We just try to be rational."

"We recognized early on that very smart people do very dumb things, and we wanted to know why and who, so we could avoid them."

"Being rational is a moral duty. You should never be stupider than you have to be."

"The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward. If you want a specific outcome, you must plan the incentives correctly."