## Highlights - He didn’t need to have the answers to everything; he stuck to what he called his “circle of competence,” the areas in which he was an expert. In fact, he told us that he preferred to avoid stupidity instead of trying to be intelligent. In the age of social media and Wikipedia, a lot of people act like they know the answer to nearly everything. But when politics came up with Munger, he refrained from offering any firm viewpoint, only positing that politics writ large is simply too difficult to understand without devoting your life to it. “It’s a mistake to be deeply ideological about almost anything,” he said. “It’s better to have doubt.” ([Location 356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=356)) ## New highlights added September 21, 2024 at 6:23 PM - I realized something important. I had asked for something amazing and gotten something great in exchange. ([Location 782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=782)) - It’s a strategy I went on to use throughout my career: there’s no harm in asking. ([Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=784)) ## New highlights added October 29, 2024 at 3:01 PM - What’s sad about this mimetic phenomenon is that it convinces people to sacrifice their own happiness to achieve whatever goal their peers have assigned value to, even when it’s not an authentic desire of theirs. It seems to be everywhere, and it begins early, preying ([Location 1874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=1874)) - Buffett focused on finding wonderful, simple businesses with limited competition. Cruise ships, if you will. He looked for three things: a high-quality business with a moat, an intelligent and ethical management team, and a fair price. Surprisingly, despite this hands-off approach, many of the businesses he’d invested in had thrived, with some growing fiftyfold since the time he acquired them. ([Location 1979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=1979)) - “What do you mean, put grandma on the roof?” Brian laughed at our innocence. “It’s an old business saying: Sometimes grandma gets really old and fragile, and she’s your grandma, so you obviously want to kill her kindly. You can’t just unceremoniously push her off your roof,” he told us. Chris and I looked at each other nervously, unsure where this was going. “First, you get grandma really comfortable and make her a lovely cup of tea inside the house,” Brian continued. “Then you tell her, ‘Grandma, I want to give you a tour of the house.’ You walk her upstairs and say, ‘Oh it’s such a beautiful view out on the deck. Let’s go look.’ And then when grandma is on the roof, admiring the view, you push her off the roof—THUD!” ([Location 2131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2131)) - Charlie Munger. One of his quotes that stuck with us was the constant refrain to “invert, always invert!” Munger said that “problems are often easiest solved in reverse” and explained that it’s much easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do. To think about what you hate, then work backward to optimize your life to avoid the things you disliked being a part of it. ([Location 2315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2315)) - My key insight at this time was one that would become the core of how I run my businesses today: It’s not enough to do what you love. You also have to stop doing what you hate. The goal isn’t—as many people think—to not work at all; it’s to only work on things that you enjoy doing. The stuff that you’d do even if you didn’t get paid for it. ([Location 2328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2328)) - He took a contrarian approach to traditional investors in almost every way imaginable. Where most investors sought diversification, Munger dubbed it “deworsification,” asking, “Why would you ever want to invest in your hundredth best idea?” Where others focused on betting on short-term swings in the stock market, buying and selling depending on what was happening, Munger advocated investors should buy a great company and then “do nothing.” Often for decades. ([Location 2351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2351)) - “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” It’s not a quote about death—it’s about inversion and avoiding mistakes. Figure out your worst-case scenario (in business, going broke) and figure out how to avoid it. ([Location 2359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2359)) - This had happened to us many times before. In 2010, we had bootstrapped Flow, a project management app, growing it to many millions of dollars in revenue. Then, Asana came out. Then Monday.com. Then Wrike. Venture capitalists poured hundreds of millions of dollars into competitors and we, being the patsies at the poker table, stubbornly refused to raise money. We kept thinking we’d beat them on merit. That our software was better designed, more thoughtful, and superior technologically. We couldn’t have been more wrong. We were lambs to the slaughter, losing over ten million dollars in the course of a few years. ([Location 2795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2795)) - “What does it feel like to have such a big business?” he’d asked, wide eyed. I was honest. “Okay, imagine that you love chopping wood in your backyard,” I said. “You do it for fun. To relax. To enter a flow state. Then, one day, your neighbor pops his head over the fence and asks you if you could chop him some wood, too. He offers you $20. Suddenly, the thing you love doing becomes a business. Before you know it, you’re chopping wood for all your neighbors. You buy a truck and start selling door-to-door. It’s just you and a bunch of buddies, side by side, chopping wood and working outside. The business grows. And grows. And grows. And a decade later you wake up. You’re in a little glass office, perched atop one of many sawmills. You look down at the hundreds of workers beneath you, operating the industrial equipment on the factory floor. Huge logs getting fed into machines that slice the wood. Totally automated. “And there you are. Isolated in your little office, wearing a suit, the air-conditioning blowing a chill down your back. No axe. No fresh air. No friendly coworkers. Just you sitting in your office, doing some paperwork—alone. That is what it feels like to build a business this big.” He looked dejected and I wondered if I should have just shut my mouth and told him it was awesome. He could learn the truth on his own. Every founder dreams about getting to the end—the part where they’ve created the billion-dollar behemoth—but ironically, once there, we all fantasize about going back to the beginning. After all, the beginning is the best part, and most of us probably wouldn’t have kept going if we knew about all the speed bumps. The journey is the reward. ([Location 2959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2959)) - And nobody but Jiro and his son (in training for decades) was allowed to cook the rice. His restaurant was humble. Just ten seats in an unassuming corner of a Tokyo subway station. And yet, he had three Michelin stars—the culinary world’s highest honor. Unlike me, Jiro was still chopping wood, just to the most extreme degree. I wondered if this approach, the polar opposite of my own, resulted in a happier life. ([Location 2977](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2977)) - people don’t like doing things that aren’t their own idea. ([Location 2986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=2986)) - Is this what “making it” was supposed to feel like? Nobody had told me about this aspect of getting rich. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone wanted something from me, for better or worse. Some approached me with thrilling business ventures or exclusive social invites. Others, caught in the grips of their own mental struggles, mistakenly involved me in their fantasies. ([Location 3079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=3079)) - There was something else that surprised me about this big lifestyle upgrade. The thing that nobody tells you is that nobody is impressed when you drive a flashy car or show off your crazy house on Instagram. My friend Morgan Housel put it well: “People aren’t thinking: ‘Wow, I’m impressed by this person!’ They’re thinking, ‘I wish I had that house.’” Or more likely: “What a prick.” ([Location 3159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=3159)) - In reality, the things that had made me happy were simply moments of meaning. Pushing my sons on the swings at the park. Enjoying a sunset over the lake at my cabin. Laughing over dinner with old friends. A particularly challenging game of tennis. Chopping vegetables quietly while the kids laughed and played in the yard. These moments were becoming few and far between, often interrupted by stressful text messages, conference calls, and an endless stream of daily emails. ([Location 3188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=3188)) - For me, the money had become a burden, and quickly. Something overwhelming, which didn’t seem to bring me joy. I’d tried spending it, which only left me feeling hollow. I’d tried focusing on growing it—building the castle walls—but that, too, felt kind of meaningless. I already had enough to live the life I wanted forever—why keep going? Fear? Insecurity? My motto for decades—a quote from Andy Grove, that “only the paranoid survive”—was beginning to feel unproductive. I worried I’d just keep going forever. Get addicted to more. A workaholic scratching at my pocket to jolt off emails, to take action for action’s sake. ([Location 3719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=3719)) - Famine, Affluence, and Morality, by Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who argued that anyone with the means to do so has a moral obligation to give to those in need. ([Location 3742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CKVJS17Z&location=3742))