How to guarantee a miserable life

Timeless lessons from Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger was a hero of mine. He passed away in November 2023 at the age of 99. In this week's newsletter, I pay tribute to him by delving into the timeless lessons he shared during his 1986 commencement address at Harvard.

In this commencement address, Munger expands on the ideas presented by Johnny Carson in a speech titled 'How to guarantee a miserable life.' Carson acknowledged that he couldn't provide a recipe for happiness, but drew from personal experience to outline a path to misery. I will delve into Munger's additional insights, building upon Carson's prescriptions for a joyless existence.

Why this approach? As Munger puts it “It is in the nature of things, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward”, revealing a unique perspective on problem-solving – an approach rooted in the idea that addressing challenges backward often yields the most effective solutions.

This approach is inspired by the renowned German mathematician Jacobi, known for solving complex mathematical problems through inversion – the concept of Man Muss Immer Umkehren roughly translated as "Invert, always invert".

When practically applying inversion, consider addressing an issue like corruption in an organization. Instead of focusing on preventing corruption directly, approach the problem by asking, 'What can I do to increase corruption?' Identify these potential factors and implement measures to counteract them. That is the approach Carson and Munger apply here.

The first three prescriptions stem from Johnny Carson, with the subsequent ones originating from Charlie Munger. After each prescription I will add in additional notes of my own and possible counteract actions.

Prescriptions for a guaranteed Miserable life

Prescription 1: Ingest chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception

As Munger emphasizes, substance abuse can have profound consequences, contributing to the demise of even highly intelligent and ethical individuals.

“The four closest friends of my youth were highly intelligent, ethical, humorous types, favored in person and background. Two are long dead, with alcohol a contributing factor, and a third is a living alcoholic-if you call that living. While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. And yet, I have yet to meet anyone, in over six decades of life, whose life was worsened by fear and avoidance of such a deceptive pathway to destruction.” - Charlie Munger

Counteraction: Simply put, stay away from drugs

Prescription 2: Envy

Munger often talks about how the world is not driven by greed but by envy. “It was wreaking havoc long before it got a bad press in the laws of Moses”. If a miserable life is your goal, then this prescription is a sure path. Letting envy of others' possessions consume you can lead to discontent and irrational decisions.

Counteraction: Conquer envy in your life. Avoid fixating on what others have in comparison to you, as this often results in biased decisions with negative consequences. Steering clear of envy is key to living a long and happy life.

Prescription 3: Be Resentful

For those of you who want misery, I also recommend refraining from practice of the Disraeli compromise, designed for people who find it impossible to quit resentment cold turkey. Disraeli, as he rose to become one of the greatest Prime Ministers, learned to give up vengeance as a motivation for action, but he did retain some outlet for resentment by putting the names of people who wronged him on pieces of paper in a drawer. Then, from time to time, he reviewed these names and took pleasure in noting the way the world had taken his enemies down without his assistance. - Charlie Munger

Counteract action: Life is challenging on its own, and adding the bitter pill of resentment only makes the journey harder. Learn to relinquish vengeance as a driving force for your actions. If breaking free from feelings of resentment proves difficult, consider adopting the Disraeli Compromise.

Munger’s Prescriptions

Prescription 4: Be unreliable

There is no surer way to guarantee a life of misery than being unreliable in all facets. The failure to uphold promises and commitments is guaranteed to undermine both your professional and personal relationships.

“Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit, you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, how so ever great. If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for you. Master this one habit, and you will always play the role of the hare in the fable, except that instead of being outrun by one fine turtles, you will be outrun by hordes and hordes of mediocre turtles and even some mediocre turtles on crutches” - Charlie Munger

Counteraction: Reliability is essential for progress in life. Be a person of your word.

Prescription 5: Only learn from your own experiences.

(To guarantee a miserable life) Learn everything you possibly can from your own experiences minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement. You can see the results of not learning from others mistakes by simply looking about you how little originality there is in the common disasters of mankind drunk driving deaths, reckless driving mamimings, incurable venereal diseases, conversion of bright college students into brainwashed zombies as members of destructive cults, business failures through repetition of obvious mistakes made by predecessors, various forms of crowd folly, and so on. - Charlie Munger

Counteraction: Learn as much as you can vicariously from the experiences and mistakes of others. It's far less painful than learning through personal hardship. As the saying goes, 'You don't have to pee on an electric fence to learn not to do it.' Identify common pitfalls and avoid them. Similarly, draw inspiration from the best work that preceded yours. Consider Sir Isaac Newton, who mastered the contributions of his predecessors. Summing up the reason for his successes, he said, 'If I have seen a little farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.' Embrace the wealth of knowledge available from others, steering clear of their mistakes and striving to emulate their successes.”

“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other” - Benjamin Franklin

Prescription 6 : Embrace Defeat

"Go down and stay down when you get your first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life." In other words, when you fail, do not try again.

Because there is so much adversity out there, even for the lucky and wise, this will guarantee that, in due course, you will be permanently mired in misery. Ignore at all cost the lesson contained in the accurate epitaph written for himself by Epictetus: "Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favored by the gods.” -Charlie Munger

Counteraction: Inevitably, there will be failures in life. However, the key is to persevere and keep trying, even when faced with adversity. As the saying goes, "You can cry, all right. But you can't quit." Embrace the understanding that failure is a natural part of life; what truly matters is the determination to continue living and striving, even when faced with challenges. As I often say and have written about previously “Failure doesn’t matter, success does”

Prescription 7: Ignore basic wisdom

My final prescription to you for a life of fuzzy thinking and infelicity is to ignore a story they told me when I was very young about a rustic who said, “I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I’d never go there.” Most people smile, as you did, at the rustic’s ignorance and ignore his basic wisdom. If my experience is any guide, the rustic’s approach is to be avoided at all cost by someone bent on misery. To help fail, you should discount as mere quirk, with no useful message, the method of the rustic, which is the same one used in Carson’s speech

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage we have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. I’m really better at determining my level of incompetency and then just avoiding that. I prefer to think in reverse. - Charlie Munger

Reference

Poor Charlie’s Almanack - Hardcover or Free ebook from StripePress