Collection: Charlie Munger - #114 'Simple Ways To Make Your Life Easier'
[Transcript]
INTERVIEWER 00:00
So, sort of related to this, Charles Miller – asks, “You’ve talked about the search for psychological research and education grounding how humans truly operate. Have you found it yet?”
CHARLIE MUNGER 00:20
Well, no, I haven’t found anything yet except how to get by fairly well, that's harder than a lot of people think. Just think about how hard it is to get far ahead in life.
Imagine, supposed you want to get ahead in Caltech, you like the academic a lot. Caltech is very good at getting people tenure. If you’re very brilliant and work 80 or 90 hours a week for 9 or 10 years, you get tenure. That is not what I call an easy life, and competing with the Homer Joe Stewarts.
INTERVIEWER 01:02
Some of us love it. That’s all I can say, Charlie.
CHARLIE MUNGER 01:05
What?
INTERVIEWER 01:06
Some of us love that life.
CHARLIE MUNGER 01:07
Yes, of course. I know. And that’s fine. I chose to avoid it because I knew I wouldn’t win big at it.
INTERVIEWER 01:18
So Laura Jalif –
CHARLIE MUNGER 01:20
A perfectly successful professor by ordinary standards, but I would not have been a star.
INTERVIEWER 01:27
So finding your own path is something you really recommend to everyone. The place where you can shine-
CHARLIE MUNGER 01:35
No. [Inaudible]
What helps everyone is to get in something that’s going up and it just carries you along without much talent or work.
And so if you pick a really strong place, like say Costco, and you go to work at it and you really are reliable and nice, you’re going to do fine in life. You got a big tailwind.
But in the lead education, nobody wants to go to work for Costco, from Harvard or MIT or Stanford. And of course it’s the one place where it would be easiest to get ahead.
(Source: https://youtu.be/WaDU1J91hY8)
