加载中…查理芒格在美国南加州大学法学院的演讲（英文）
(2018-11-22 12:18:29)
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芒格在美国南加州大学芒格段八一 |
Well no doubt many of you are
wondering why the speaker is so old,
well the answer is obviously he
hasn’t died yet.
And why was the speaker chosen?
Well I don’t know that either. I like to think that the development
department had nothing to do with it.
Whatever the reason I think
it’s very fitting that I'm sitting here because I see one crowd of
faces in the rear not wearing robes, and I know, from having
educated an army of descendants, who really deserves a lot of the
honors that are being given are the people here
upfront.
The sacrifice and the wisdom
and the value transfer that comes from one generation to the next
can never be underrated.
Well no doubt many of you are
wondering why the speaker is so old,
well the answer is obviously he
hasn’t died yet.
And why was the speaker chosen?
Well I don’t know that either. I like to think that the development
department had nothing to do with it.
Whatever the reason I think
it’s very fitting that I'm sitting here because I see one crowd of
faces in the rear not wearing robes, and I know, from having
educated an army of descendants, who really deserves a lot of the
honors that are being given are the people here
upfront.
The sacrifice and the wisdom
and the value transfer that comes from one generation to the next
can never be underrated.
And that gives me enormous
pleasure as I look at this sea of Asian faces to my
left.
All my life I’ve admired
Confucius. I like the idea of filial piety, the idea that there are
values that are taught and duties that come naturally and all that
should be passed on to the next generation.
And you people who don’t think
there’s anything in this idea, please note how fast these Asian
faces are rising in American life.
I think they have
something.
All right, I scratched out a
few notes and I’m going to try and just give an account of some
ideas and attitudes that have worked well for me.
I don’t claim that they are
perfect for everybody.
Although I think many of them
are pretty close to Universal values and many of them are can’t
fail ideas.
What are the core ideas that
have helped me?
Well luckily I got at a very
early age, the idea that the safest way to try and get what you
want, is to try and deserve what you want.
It’s such a simple idea, it’s
the golden rule so to speak.
You want to deliver to the
world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
There is no ethos in my
opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to
have.
By and large the people who
have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, just
honors emoluments.
They win the respect, the
deserved trust, of the people they deal with, and there is huge
pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved
trust.
And so the way to get it is to
deliver what you’d want to buy if the circumstances were
reversed.
Occasionally you find a perfect
rogue of a person, who dies rich and widely known.
But mostly these people are
fully understood by the surrounding civilization, and when the
cathedral is full of people at the funeral ceremony, most of them
are there to celebrate the fact that the person is
dead.
And, that reminds me of the
story of the time when one of these people died and the minister
said, “it’s now time for someone to say something nice about the
deceased”.
And nobody came
forward.
And nobody came
forward.
And nobody came
forward.
And finally one man came up and
he said, “well, his brother was worse”.
That is not where you want to
go! That’s not the kind of funeral you want to have you'll leave
entirely the wrong example.
A second idea that I got very
early was that there is no love that’s so right as admiration based
love, and that love should include the instructive
dead.
Somehow I got that idea and I
lived with it all my life and it’s been very very useful to
me.
A love like that celebrated by
Somerset Maugham and his book “Of Human Bondage” that’s a sick kind
of love, it’s a disease. And if you find yourself in a disease like
that my advice to you is turn around and fix it. Eliminate
it.
Another idea that I got and
this may remind you of Confucius too, is that wisdom acquisition is
a moral duty, it’s not something you do just to advance in life.
Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.
And there’s a corollary to that
proposition which is very important, it means that you’re hooked
for lifetime learning, and without lifetime learning you people are
not going to do very well.
You are not going to get very
far in life based on what you already know.
You’re going to advance in life
by what you’re going to learn after you leave here.
If you take Berkshire Hathaway
which is certainly one of the best regarded corporations in the
world and may have the best long-term investment record in the
entire history of civilization. The skill that got Berkshire
through one decade would not have sufficed to get it through the
next decade with the achievements made.
Without Warren Buffett being a
learning machine, a continuous learning machine, the record would
have been absolutely impossible.
The same is true at lower walks
of life. I constantly see people rise in life who are not the
smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are
learning machines, they go to bed every night a little wiser than
when they got up and boy does that help particularly when you have
a long run ahead of you.
Alfred North Whitehead said it
one time that “the rapid advance of civilization came only when man
invented the method of invention”, and of course he was referring
to the huge growth of GDP per capita and all the other good things
that we now take for granted which started a few hundred years ago
and before that all was stasis.
So if civilization can progress
only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only
when you learn the method of learning.
I was very lucky. I came to law
school having learned the method of learning and nothing has served
me better in my long life than continuous learning.
And if you take Warren Buffett
and watched him with a time clock, I would say half of all the time
he spends is sitting on his ass and reading. And a big chunk of the
rest of the time is spent talking one on one either on the
telephone or personally with highly gifted people whom he trusts
and who trust him.
In other words it looks quite
academic all this worldly success.
Academia has many wonderful
values in it. I came across such a value not too long ago. It was
several years ago.
In my capacity as a hospital
board chairman I was dealing with a medical school academic. And
this man over years of hard work had made himself know more about
bone tumor pathology than almost anybody else in the world. And he
wanted to pass this knowledge on to the rest of us.
And how was he going to do it?
Well he decided to write a textbook that would be very useful to
other people.
And I don’t think a textbook
like this sells two thousand copies if those two thousand copies
are in all the major cancer centers in the world.
He took a year sabbatical, he
sat down in his computer and he had all the slides because he saved
them and organized them and filed them. He worked 17 hours a day, 7
days a week, for a year and that was his sabbatical. At the end of
the year he had one of the great bone tumor pathology textbooks in
the world.
When you’re around values like
that, you want to pick up as much as you can.
Another idea that was hugely
useful to me was that I listened in law school when some wag said,
“A legal mind is a mind that when two things are all twisted up
together and interacting, it's feasible to think responsibly about
one thing and not the other."
Well I could see from that one
sentence that that was perfectly ridiculous, and it pushed me
further into my natural drift, which was into learning all the big
ideas and all the big disciplines. So I wouldn’t be a perfect damn
fool who was trying to think about one aspect of something that
couldn’t be removed from the totality of the situation in a
constructive fashion.
And what I noted since the
really big ideas carry 95% of the *unclear*, it wasn’t at all hard
for me to pick up all the big ideas and all the big disciplines and
make them a standard part of my mental routines.
Once you have the ideas of
course they are no good if you don’t practice. You don’t practice
you lose it.
So I went through life
constantly practicing this model of disciplinary approach. Well I
can’t tell you what that’s done for me, it’s made life more fun,
it’s made me more constructive, it’s made me more helpful to
others, it’s made me enormously rich, you name it, that attitude
really helps.
Now there are dangers there,
because it works so well, that if you do it, you will frequently
find you are sitting in the presence of some other expert, maybe
even an expert that’s superior to you, supervising you. And you
will know more than he does about his own specialty, a lot more.
You will see the correct answer when he’s missed it.
That is a very dangerous
position to be in. You can cause enormous offense by helpfully
being right in a way that causes somebody else to lose face. And I
never found a perfect way to solve that problem.
I was a great poker player when
I was young but I wasn’t a good enough poker player so people
failed to sense that I thought I knew more than they did about
their subjects and it gave a lot of offense. Now I’m just regarded
as eccentric but it was a difficult period to go
through.
And my advice to you is to
learn sometimes to keep your light under a bushel.
One of my colleagues, also
number one in his class in law school, a great success in life
worked for the supreme court etc… He knew a lot and he tended to
show it as a very young lawyer and one day the senior partner
called him in and said, “listen Chuck, I want to explain something
to you. Your duty under any circumstances is to behave in such a
way that the client thinks he’s the smartest person in the world.
If you have any little energy and insight available after that, use
it to make your senior partner look like the smartest person in the
world. And only after you’ve satisfied those two obligations do you
want your light to shine at all”.
Well, that may be very good
advice for rising in a large firm. It wasn’t what I did I always
obeyed the drift of my nature and if other people didn’t like it I
didn’t need to be adored by everybody.
Another idea, and by the way
when I talk about this multidisciplinary attitude I’m really
following a very key idea of the greatest lawyer of antiquity,
Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Cicero is famous for saying, “a
man who doesn’t know what happened before he was born goes through
life like a child”. That is a very correct idea of Cicero’s. And
he’s right to ridicule somebody so foolish as not to know what
happened before he was born.
But if you generalize Cicero as
I think one should, there are all these other things that you
should know in addition to history and those other things are the
big ideas in all the other disciplines. And it doesn’t help you
just to know them enough just so you can *unclear* them back on an
exam and get an A. You have to learn these things in such a way
that they’re in a mental latticework in your head and you
automatically use them for the rest of your life.
If you do that I solemnly
promise you that one day you’ll be walking down the street and look
to your right and left and think, “my heavenly days! I’m now one of
the few most competent people of my whole age
forward."
If you don’t do it, many of the
brightest of you will live in the middle ranks or in the
shallows.
Another idea that I got, and it
was encapsulated by that story the Dean recounted about the man who
wanted to know where he was going to die and he wouldn’t go there,
that rustic let that idea have a profound truth in his
hand.
The way complex adaptive
systems work and the way mental constructs work; problems
frequently get easier and I would even say usually are easier to
solve if you turn around in reverse.
In other words if you want to
help India, the question you should ask is not “how can I help
India?”, you think “what’s doing the worst damage in India? What
would automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid
it?"
You’d think they are logically
the same thing, they’re not.
Those of you who have mastered
algebra know that inversion frequently will solve problems which
nothing else will solve.
And in life, unless you’re more
gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that
you can't solve in other ways.
But to use a little inversion
now, what will really fail in life? What do you want to avoid? Such
an easy answer;
sloth and
unreliability.
If you’re unreliable it doesn’t
matter what your virtues are, you’re going to crater
immediately.
So doing what you have
faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your
conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.
Another thing I think should be
avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s
mind.
You’ve seen that. You see a lot
of it on TV you know preachers for instance, you know they’ve all
got different ideas about theology and a lot of them have minds
that are made of cabbage.
But that can happen with
political ideology. And if you're young it’s easy to drift in to
loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you
start shouting the orthodox ideology out what you’re doing is
pounding it in, pounding it in and you’re gradually ruining your
mind so you want to be very careful with this ideology. It’s a big
danger.
In my mind I got a little
example I use whenever I think about ideology and it’s these
Scandinavian canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of
Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools in
the Aaron Rapids here in the United States. The death rate was
100%.
A big whirlpool is not
something you want to go into and I think the same is true about a
really deep ideology.
I have what I call an iron
prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward
preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say “I’m not
entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the
arguments against my position better than the people do who are
supporting it. I think o
Now you can say that’s too much
of an iron discipline, it’s not too much of an iron discipline,
it’s not even that hard to do. It sounds a lot like the iron
prescription of Ferdinand the Great, “it’s not necessary to hope in
order to persevere."
That probably is too tough for
most people, I don’t think it’s too tough for me but it's too tough
for most people.
But this business of not
drifting into extreme ideology is a very very important thing in
life if you want to have more correct knowledge and be wiser than
other people. A heavy ideology is very likely to do you
in.
Another thing of course that
does one in is the self serving bias to which we are all
subject.
You think that your little me
is entitled to do what it wants to do, and for instance why
shouldn’t the true little me overspend my income?
Well, there once was a man who
became the most famous composer in the world but he was utterly
miserable most of the time and one of the reasons was he always
overspent his income, that was Mozart.
If Mozart can’t get by with
this kind of asinine conduct, I don’t think you should try
it.
Generally speaking, envy,
resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought,
self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the
very hardest things to reverse, you do not want to drift into
self-pity.
I have a friend who carried a
big stack of linen cards about this thick, and when somebody would
make a comment that reflected self pity, he would take out one of
the cards, take the top one off the stack and hand it to the
person, and the card said, “your story has touched my heart, never
have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you”. Well you
can say that’s waggery, but I suggest that every time you find
you’re drifting into self pity, I don’t care what the cause your
child could be dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to improve
the situation, just give yourself one of those cards.
t’s a ridiculous way to behave,
and when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody
else, almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard
condition and yet you can train yourself out of it.
And of course a self serving
bias, you want to get out of yourself, thinking that what’s good
for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all
these ridiculous conclusions based on the subconscious tendency to
serve one’s self.
It’s a terribly inaccurate way
to think and of course you want to drive that out of yourself
because you want to be wise not foolish.
You also have to allow for the
self serving bias of everybody else, because most people are not
gonna remove it all that successfully, the only condition being
what it is. If you don’t allow for self serving bias in your
conduct, again you’re a fool.
I watched the brilliant Harvard
law Review trained general counsel of *unclear* lose his career,
and what he did was when the CEO was aware some underling has done
something wrong the general counsel said “gee we don’t have any
legal duty to report this but I think it’s what we should do it’s
our moral duty."
Of course the general counsel
was totally correct but of course it didn’t work it was a very
unpleasant thing for the CEO to do and he put it off and put if off
and of course everything erode into a major scandal and down went
the CEO and the general counsel with him.
The correct answer in
situations like that was given by Ben Franklin, he said “if you
want to persuade appeal to interest not to reason.” The self
serving bias is so extreme.
If the general counsel said,
“look this is going to erupt, it’s something that will destroy you
take away your money, take away your status it’s a perfect
disaster”, it would have worked!
You want to appeal to interest,
you want to do it of lofty motives, but you should not avoid
appealing to interest.
Another thing, perverse
incentives. You don’t want to be in a perverse incentive system
that’s causing you to behave more and more foolishly or worse and
worse.
Incentives are too powerful a
controller of human cognition and human behavior and one of the
things you are going to find in some modern law firms is billable
hour quotas and I could not have lived under a billable hour quota
of 2,400 hours a year. That would have caused serious problems for
me I wouldn’t have done it and I don’t have a solution for you for
that you have to figure it out for yourself but it’s a significant
problem.
Perverse associations, also to
be avoided. You particularly want to avoid working directly under
somebody you really don’t admire and don’t want to be
like.
It’s very dangerous we are all
subject to control to some extent our authority figures strictly
authority figures that are rewarding us.
And that requires some talent,
the way I solved that is I figured out the people I did admire and
I maneuvered cleverly without criticizing anybody so I was working
entirely under people I admired. And a lot of law firms will permit
that if you’re shrewd enough to work it out and your outcome in
life will be way more satisfactory and way better if you work under
people you really admire, the alternative is not a good
idea.
Objectivity
maintenance.
Well we all remember that
Darwin paid special attention to disconfirming evidence
particularly to disconfirm something he believed and
loved.
Well objectivity maintenance
routines are totally required in life if you’re going to be a
correct thinker. And they were talking about Darwin’s attitude,
special attention to the disconfirming evidence, and also to
checklist routines.
Checklist routines avoid a lot
of errors. You should have all this elementary wisdom and then you
should go through and have a checklist in order to use it. There is
no other procedure that will work as well.
A last idea that I found very
important is I realized very early that non-egality would work
better in the parts of the world I wanted to inhabit. What do I
mean by non-egality? I mean John Wood when he was the number one
basketball coach in the world, he just said to the bottom five
players, “you don’t get to play your spurring partners”, the top
seven did the whole playing. Well the top seven learned more,
remember the learning machine, because they were doing all the
playing. And when he got to that system Wood won more than he’d
ever won before.
I think the game of life in
many respects is getting a lot of practice into the hands of the
people that have the most aptitude to learn and the most tendency
to be learning machines. And if you want the very highest reaches
of human civilization that’s where you have to go.
Then we got chauffeur
knowledge, they have learned to prattle the talk. They have a big
head of hair, they have a fine temper in the voice, they make a
hell of an impression, but in the end they've got chauffeur
knowledge… I think I’ve just described practically every politician
in the United States.
And you are gonna have the
problem in your life of getting the responsibility into the people
of the Planck knowledge in a way for the people who have the
chauffeur knowledge, and there are huge forces working against
you.
My generation has failed you to
some extent. We are delivering to you in California a legislature
where only the certified nuts from the left and the certified nuts
from the right are allowed to serve and none of them are
removable.
That’s what my generation has
done for you, but you wouldn’t like it to be too easy would
you?
Another thing that I found is
an intense interest of the subject is indispensable if you are
really going to excel. I could force myself to be fairly good in a
lot of things, but I couldn’t be really good in anything where I
didn’t have an intense interest, so to some extent you’re going to
have to follow me.
If at all feasible you want to
drift into doing something in which you really have a natural
interest.
Another thing you have to do of
course is have a lot of assiduity. I like that word because it
means sit down in your ass until you do it.
I’ve had marvelous partners all
my life. I think I got them partly because I tried to deserve them
and partly because I was wise enough to select them and partly
maybe it was some luck.
But two partners that I chose
for one little phase of my life had the following rule and they
created a little designed build, construction team. And they sat
down and said, 2 man partnership, divide everything equally, here’s
the rule; “whenever we're behind in our commitments to other people
we will both work 14 hours a day until we caught up."
Well needless to say that firm
didn’t fail! The people died rich. It’s such a simple
idea.
Another thing of course is life
will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows, doesn’t
matter. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think
the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every
mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every
mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your
duty was not to be submerged in self-pity but to utilize the
terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good
idea.
And you may remember the
epitaph which Epictetus left for himself: “Here lies Epictetus, a
slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favored of the
gods.”
Well, that’s the way Epictetus
is now remembered. He said big consequences. And he was favorite of
the Gods! He was favored because he became wise, and he became
manly. Very good idea.
I got a final little idea
because I’m all for prudence as well as opportunism. My grandfather
was the only federal judge in his city for nearly forty years and I
really admired him. I’m his namesake. And I’m Confucian enough
that, even now, I sit here and I’m saying, “Well, Judge Munger
would be pleased to see me here.”
So I'm Confucian enough, all
these years after my grandfather is dead, to carry the torch for my
grandfather's values. And, grandfather Munger was a federal judge
at a time when there were no pensions for widows of federal judges.
So if he didn't save from his income, why, my grandmother would
have been in penury. And being the kind of man he was he underspent
his income all his life and left her in comfortable
circumstances.
Along the way, in the thirties,
my uncle's bank failed and couldn't reopen. And my grandfather
saved the bank by taking over a third of his assets—good assets—and
putting them into the bank and taking the horrible assets in
exchange. And, of course, it did save the bank.
While my grandfather took a
loss, he got most of his money back eventually. But I've always
remembered the example. And so when I got to college and I came
across Houseman, I remember the little poem from Houseman, and that
went something like this:
“The thoughts of
others
Were light and
fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of
trouble,
And mine were
steady;
So I was ready
When trouble
came.”
You can say, “Who wants to go
through life anticipating trouble?” Well, I did! All my life, I've
gone through life anticipating trouble. And here I am, well along
on my eighty-fourth year, and like Epictetus, I've had a favored
life. It didn't make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time
and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came. It didn't hurt
me at all. In fact, it helped me. So I quick claim to you Houseman
and Judge Munger.
The last idea that I want to
give you, as you go out into a profession that frequently puts a
lot of procedure, and a lot of precautions, and a lot of
mumbo-jumbo into what it does, this is not the highest form which
civilization can reach. The highest form that civilization can
reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just
totally reliable people correctly trusting one
another.
That's the way an operating
room works at the Mayo Clinic. If a bunch of lawyers were to
introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die. So never
forget, when you're a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling
this stuff, but you don't have to buy it. In your own life, what
you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed
marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not
enter.
Well, that’s enough for one
graduation. I hope these ruminations of an old man are useful to
you. In the end, I’m like the Old Valiant-for-Truth in The
Pilgrim’s Progress: “My sword I leave to him who can wear
it.”
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