I’ve been slowly listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.

I like his practicality. He’s never trying to be overly academic, as if he needs to prove how smart he is.

He says Berkshire’s success doesn’t come from them solving hard problems, but from spending their time knowing what a simple solution looks like — and acting on it when they see it!

We’ve succeeded by making the world easy for us, not by solving the world’s hard problems.

Munger analogizes their approach to investing like jumping a fence. They don’t spend all their time trying to figure out how to jump a seven-foot tall fence. Instead, they find a spot where the fence is only a foot tall, jump it, and take the reward on the other side.

The approach he articulates for investing, in fact, seems broadly applicable to any kind of problem solving:

1. Quickly eliminate the universe of what not to do.
2. Follow up with a multi-disciplinary attack on what remains.
3. Act decisively when — and only when — the right circumstances appear.

Whenever people ask him for advice (as if somehow he could bestow upon them some kind of knowledge that will save them the pain and hardship of experience) he seems anathema to the idea that you can live life without making lots of mistakes.

To paraphrase Charlie: “I don’t want you to think that we have a method of learning that will prevent you from making mistakes. The best you can do is learn to make fewer mistakes than others. And then, when you inevitably do make mistakes, learn to acknowledge them and fix them quickly.”

Straightforward. Practical. No bullshit. No ego. (Basically the opposite of everything I see on social platforms.)

I quite enjoyed his perspective.