98-Year-Old Charlie Munger's Life Advice Will Change Your Future | M.Ross 2017【C:C.M Ep.229】

 

[Transcript]

SCOTT DERUE: As you look back on your life experience, what's the most important piece of advice that you would offer everyone in the room tonight as they look forward and into their futures?

 

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, there are a few obvious ones. They're all ancient, Ben Franklin had.

Marriage is the most important decision you have, not your business career. And it'll do more for you good or bad than – (Laughter) – anything else. And Ben Franklin had the best advice ever given on marriage, he says, "keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shut thereafter." (Laughter)

It's amazing how if you just get up every morning and keep plugging, and have some discipline, and keep learning, and it's amazing how it works out okay. And I don't think it's wise to have an ambition to be President of the United States or a billionaire or something like that, because the odds are too much against you. Much better to aim low.

I did not intend to get rich, I wanted to get independent. I just overshot. (Laughter & Applause)

And by the way, while you're clapping, some of the overshooting was accidental. There's some – there's a big – You can be very deserving and very intelligent and very disciplined, but there's also a factor of luck that comes into this thing.

And the people will get the outcomes that seem extraordinary are the people who have discipline and intelligence and good virtue, plus a hell of a lot of luck. Why wouldn't the world work like that? So you shouldn't give credit for the unusual.

A lot of people – a friend of mine said about a colleague of his in his fraternity: he says old George was a duck sitting on a pond and they raised the level of a pond.

There are a lot of people would just walk into the right place and rise and then and there are a lot of very eminent people who have many advantages, and they've got one little flaw or one bit of bad luck, and they're mired in misery all their lives. But that makes it interesting to have all this variation.

(Source: https://youtu.be/S9HgIGzOENA)

 

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