EP.130 - Applying Charlie Munger's Principles as Your Life Compass | Further Your Lifestyle Podcast

Speaker 1: 0:00

Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the further your lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hassles. My name's Chris, I am your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you. Episode 130 today. Nice number there, 130. We're getting closer and closer to 150, which it just makes me think wow. It's been a journey and I want to say a big thank you to everyone that has been part of this journey, whether it's here for the first time, whether you're here for the first time tuning in, or maybe you've been here since episode one really do appreciate you giving it the support and tuning in Now.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Today we are talking about the principles for life. Now there's a whole look. We could spend probably hours of conversation regarding the principles for life, but today there's a bit of a spin. Now, firstly, to just set some context, I will be taking a, I guess, a perspective from someone else's perspective and tapping into that, will be going through a whole bunch of different questions that they've pulled through that have come from a famous individual, and we'll get to that shortly. But just in case you're not sure what we're talking about principles for life, what are we even talking about here? I've got some definition. Let me set some context for you.

Speaker 1: 1:08

So principles are foundational truths that guide behavior and decision making to achieve desired outcomes in life. They're consistent guidelines that can be applied repeatedly in various situations. To attain goals Makes sense. And I guess there's two other little things that I want to make sure I cover in advance of getting into the detail of what we're actually going to be conversating about today. But there's adopting principles and then there's also embracing mental models around that. So adopting principles is essentially when we integrate these principles into our daily life and they can kind of serve like a compass or a map, especially during uncertain and challenging times. They also enable us to foster consistency in actions and decisions, leading to more predictable and desired outcomes. That's adopting. Now, when it comes to embracing mental models, here we're more talking about an understanding and using mental models that can enhance one's ability to make informed decisions by providing diverse set of lenses through which to view challenges. So we're looking at things from different perspectives, and it also enables us to encourage holistic thinking, meaning we're drawing on knowledge from various fields, various disciplines across all areas of life, not just a biased opinion from one perspective.

Speaker 1: 2:24

Now, today what we're talking about are six mental principles for living your best life, and these have come from Charlie Munger. Now, if you don't know who he is, he's a big time investor from Berkshire Hathaway and he's laid out these. He's basically got six different points that he you know what are his six mental principles for life and he's got a bit of a quote that goes with it. Now, this has actually been formulated by someone else in an article and that has been written on medium and it's by Thomas Apong. But I just started to read through it a bit more and this one stuck out to me. You know, this podcast is about furthering your lifestyle, so I figured this is something very relevant for now and what we're doing in life. So that's what we're going to be diving in today. We're going to get into the details, but we're going to quickly roll the intro. Let's get into it. All right.

Speaker 1: 3:12

So how will I be doing this? Essentially, as I said, there's about six different points here. There's a bunch of quotes that go with it. I'm going to read them out. I have not gone through this article. I have not read this article. I don't know what I've been for, to be honest, and I'm going to essentially read out the quote, read out the statement, and then we're going to have a conversation about it. So I'm going to answer it with my own. You know how I react to it straightaway, but then if you want to have a conversation about it too, chuck a comment down below. If you're here on the YouTube, or reach out, drop me a message. However you want to interact, or you can go through this yourself and have the conversation with yourself of making you think outside the box, or maybe not how you usually do. So that's why I'm here to have this conversation with you, to give my insight, but also look at it from my own perspective as well. So, number one, it is master the wisdom others have already figured out. And Charlie Munger, his quote is I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart. Look, this is very interesting and I think I've kind of been touching on this over the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 1: 4:14

We have such an amazing opportunity before us because at the time of this, you know it's 2023, the opportunity that we have at our hands and the access to be able to do things. You know we can do things from our phone with a you know click of a button. We can do things on the internet. With a click of a button. We can chat to people all over the world. We can have video calls. We can access information so quickly and in real time. We can have chat. Gpt create an entire code for us, like a whole website. You know algorithms, everything like it's. It's just unbelievable.

Speaker 1: 4:46

Now, I'm not talking about that. What he's talking about is mastering the wisdom others have already figured out. Now, a good example of this is I don't know how old he is. He's probably probably beyond 80. To be honest, he's been investing let's say he's been investing for 60 years. Right, and with that in mind, he, if you know he's been investing for 60 years and he's got 60 years of experience, right. You come along today. You can essentially tap into Charlie Munger and start to read, like what we're doing today, and understand what has he been doing for 60 years that has enabled him to be successful. Now, it's not going to necessarily take us 60 years to be as successful as him, because he's had to go through and learn all that information he's had to go through and experience all that. Now, yes, we will still need to experience it, we will still need to learn a lot of it, but it means we're able to learn from his breadcrumbs, learn from his mistakes, learn from you.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Know what to do and not what to do, and to have access to that in this day and age is its power, and it saves you a lot of time. It's like with anything. Now, if you want to learn how to run back in the day, you would have and I'm talking about running because I'm a runner, you know you would have to probably go through a coaching program, maybe look up a very generic running training plan, and it wouldn't necessarily be fit for you. Today, you can access YouTube. You can reach out to other people that are running that are similar to you. You can get access to both those things so you might find someone that's of similar size or similar stamina or similar age or similar situation as you and you can learn how have they gone about doing their training, because you know it's the most similar to you, whereas you can't obviously go follow a.

Speaker 1: 6:24

You want to run a sub two hour half marathon if you've never ever run in your life. You know you need to find something. You know you need to find a plan for your first time. Or maybe maybe you're a shift worker and you know you have to find where's the best time to figure out how to do group runs, because there's, you know, if you're only running at night, most people are sleeping at night, so how can you find that so you can tap into information from different people, because they're also going through that experience.

Speaker 1: 6:49

So the big point here is master the wisdom. Others have already figured out now that we can tap into a lot of different examples here, but I think it's very straightforward. It speaks for itself. You know, like if you go to a weekend seminar to learn about how to how to sell books, you know, all of a sudden, you've spent, you know, two days immerse yourself. You've come out with lots of knowledge. The thing here is, though, if you do nothing with that, then essentially you've learned nothing, but you need to take that knowledge, take that wisdom and go apply it, and you've sped up. You know, potentially you've saved yourself a couple of years because you've already got enough of the information to enable you to slingshot and get ahead. I think that makes sense, like, to me it makes sense. And look, to be honest, that's why I personally share a lot of my own journey, because I feel like for me, I'm learning as I go, but if someone else wants to come along, watch some of my stuff, watch some analysis stuff, and you're able to get ahead. That's how I got ahead. When I first started, I binge watched other people's content for a good three months and I learned what was working, what wasn't working, how can I apply it to my model, what makes sense for me, what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses, where can I apply it? And, again, mastering the wisdom others have already figured out.

Speaker 1: 7:57

Number two is avoiding errors leads to better outcomes in the long run. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent. Avoiding errors leads to better outcomes in the long run. Yeah, look, I think this one you would think is common sense, but a lot of the time we do things without thinking. Therefore, we make an error, or we make a mistake, or we stuff up and it kind of plays off.

Speaker 1: 8:24

The first one of, like you know, have a look at the you know. If you want to be somewhere in five years, find someone that's already there right, and have a look on how they live their life. What are they doing, how they apply themselves, what are the different tools, systems? What's their you know? What's their work life balance? What are they doing that enables them to continue to show up? Now, you can't exactly replicate that because we're all unique, but rather than just going to try and figure it out and keep making errors, I think when we start to actually think about it and say, okay, we know we can't do that, so therefore let's build this to avoid that right, rather than going to find the error and then building around it.

Speaker 1: 9:04

I know sometimes that you can't understand. You don't necessarily know what the problem's gonna be until you encounter it. I get that, I totally get that. But I think what he's trying to say here is we try to be super smart, but sometimes there's logical things that we can do and apply to situations, and I've had this discussion, we've made it the place that I do charity work for, and when we're solving problems, a lot of the time it can just be solved with math like this is how much quantity of space we have. This is how many things we need to fill that space. This is how much time we have. How long does it take to carry one over there? And then we're able to find, okay, this is gonna take us 12 hours to do. Even if we're rushing, it's not going to make any difference, because it'll probably make our life harder. So we can start to understand it's gonna take 12 hours. There's no fast way about it. Maybe if we get some quick wins, we might be able to speed it up and do a little bit better.

Speaker 1: 10:04

But the idea is, now that we've looked at it, it's gonna take 12 hours and that's what we can go into expecting, rather than trying to go in there and keep changing and shuffling. It might have taken us 15 hours because we didn't do any of the planning. We didn't understand where we're gonna put the stuff, how much stuff needs to fit in there, will it fit, and how much time is it gonna take, rather than just going to say, oh yeah, we'll be done today, when we didn't even do the math right. I think that makes sense. So a lot of the time we're trying to be super intelligent when really just be sensible and take some time to think about the logic around it. Does this make sense? If this is easy, what would it look like? And I think you'll start to realize that maybe it's not about trying to be the smartest man in the room, it's just really being practical. And there is that saying it's about don't necessarily work harder, but work smarter, and I think that really applies here.

Speaker 1: 10:54

The next one, number three, is victim mentality. Is how you hold yourself back, and Charlie Munger went on to say whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it's actually you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating, debilating, I don't even know what that means. So what it actually means is making someone very weak. Okay, so victimization mentality is it makes you weak? Yeah, okay, all right.

Speaker 1: 11:23

So what we're talking about here is and I, like I've experienced this myself is when something happens, a problem occurs, something doesn't go as planned. Usually and I'm generalizing here we tend to always look around and see who else to blame, what else to blame. Why are we here and how are we the victim in this situation? Oh, I can't do this now. Now, I can't do that, and sometimes situations occur it's not even relevant to us, yet we still want to play victim and make a fuss about things, but a lot of the time, we need to be responsible and accountable for us, and it's not even a lot of the time we need to be responsible and accountable for our own lives.

Speaker 1: 12:03

Therefore, when things don't go as planned, we need to take responsibility of figuring it out. I mean, again, I've done episodes and we've spoken about look, you can blame someone else, even if someone else was at fault. If you're driving the car and someone hits you, right, okay, someone hit you, it's their fault, right, they've run through a red light or whatever. Now you can't take responsibility and accountability for his actions, but what you can do is you can start to move forward right, rather than trying to blow it out of proportion. You know, becoming even though you are a victim and this isn't probably a good example, but I think it's something that we need to put on the edge of it all, because the reality is we can blow things out of proportion than they really need to be. You get hit if everyone's okay, you know. Move forward, get the details exchanged, get it covered, work through it. Maybe they just maybe they were having a bad day, right, and don't try and make it all about you, and sometimes we, in the heat of the moment, we make it worse for ourselves because we think we are entitled to something, we think that, oh no, it shouldn't happen like this. This is unfair, life is unfair. And when we start to take ownership and accountability and understanding that you know, is this actually that bad? We can actually start to move forward in life.

Speaker 1: 13:22

And you can blame other people, you can blame situations. What does it do right? What does it do? Only thing it does is it holds you back. You can have a winch, you can have a silk, you can have a complaint, and I'm not saying you can't express those things. Express those things, have a conversation with someone, get them off your chest, but then work through it and understand. It's like well, what are you gonna do about it? You either move forward or you don't right. And when you don't, it means you're holding yourself back because you wanna play victim. You wanna, you know, go through the motions of whinging and complaining. Please do not take this the wrong way. There are situations where, of course, you need to agree, the situations where you need to get through something and you need to work through something that is completely different End, because you are genuinely a victim.

Speaker 1: 14:07

I think what I'm talking about here is a good example is when we had the, you know, pandemic and we went to lockdown. Everyone went into lockdown. Everyone went into lockdown in Melbourne, right, not just me, not just someone over there, everyone End. That meant we were all in the same playing field, but people, some people would took it upon themselves to make it like no, no, you can't do this to me because of this. There is not reason. Look, we all had our reasons why we didn't want it, and we are majority of us. What we had to do was work through it, find a way through it, and otherwise, if you get so stuck on, it holds you back and you're actually not going to be able to move forward. You're just going to be stuck in. Everyone else is, you know, moving towards where we wanted to go.

Speaker 1: 14:49

I'm not trying to speak in riddles here, but I'm trying to give some a few different examples here, because this will apply differently to everyone. My, my, my encouragement here is when something happens next time, when a situation arises, a problem arises, take the moment and think about okay, yes, it sucks, what am I going to do about it rather than sick, complain and my, my, my, because I'm talking to myself here to because, at the end of the day, the amount of time we spend going through the motions of so can complaining, being victim, we could have actually probably already resolved the situation. Just saying Again, I'm not saying I've got this all figured out either, I'm talking to myself just as much. Number four is the ability to maintain a prolonged and unwavering focus on opportunity changes everything, and his quote that he says Charlie Munger is I did not succeed in life by intelligence, I succeeded because I have a long attention span. Now I think. I think this is super important and there's so many people that I've spoken to so many people. Actually, it was the other week.

Speaker 1: 15:52

I went and saw Gary V with Ethan reshop, my accountant, and there was, there was someone that you know, look, fair game. They wanted to ask Gary, what was you know? What's the shortcut to be able to, you know, get what he wants? And Gary was like what do you mean? What was the show can't talk. All you know. How do I do this? I want to be doing that, so I want it tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 16:13

And he's like there is no show cut. What do you? What are you expecting to do, unless you're going to do something illegal, dodgy? There's no shortcut, right, you need to go put in the work. You need to build the client help. You need to this person was talking about his business and you need to, you know, do a better customer service. You need to sell a different product. You need to find a way that gets you the money as quick as possible, that is legit and that will take time. There's no, there's no shortcut to it, and what Charlie saying here is the ability to maintain a prolonged and unwavering focus on where you want to go on.

Speaker 1: 16:44

The opportunity changes everything, because a lot of the time Is some people will get it quickly. The opportunity was just the opportunity for a golden moment in the Goldilocks, whereas the situations where you know you're not going to get the result you want until you've seen it through over three, four, five, six, ten years, right, I mean, I worked for another company for, you know, nine years, almost ten years, before I started to do this business, but I always wanted to do a business, I just didn't know what it looked like. Now the point here is it's like I kind of did the opposite. I went through working knowing that, okay, one day I want to do it, and then that one day eventually came and I'm okay, I want to do it. So now, now I know that if I want to build something Because I've worked for so long, I understand, you know, to accumulate wealth, to build a business, because I was obviously working in another business, so helping them build their business it takes time to see that growth. It took time for me to level up, to get promoted, to get Certain level in the company, which means if I'm going to go build my own business, build my own company, build my own story, it's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. Yes, I mean I'm almost three years in and I've been able to do this, been able to achieve that, and some really great things. But I look back now and I think, well, I still have a long way to go. And I look forward and think, you know, this might take five years, might take seven years, might take ten years. I can't really compare it until I spent the same amount of time working for myself that I have working for someone else. So the other thing that I can bring into perspective here is running.

Speaker 1: 18:20

I was chatting to a good mate the other day, matt Matt. Matt's what I am, that's his tag on Instagram and we're chatting about running and you know he was saying he was quite impressed with my running and you know how I would continue to do the volumes that I do, which I'm very grateful for. But I gave him the perspective. I said, well, I've been running for seven, eight years, right, and he's been running for about seven months. So it's not apples to apples comparison. You know he's doing really great for his, you know, seven months. I think he's running 12k or 10k a week and that's great, like that, that's incredible. And you can't compare someone that's been running seven years to someone that's been running for seven months, because there's different experiences, different contexts, different volume, different ability to show up and get done. Now I might not have ran every year the same in those seven years. The first year was I was running once a week. Now I run four times a week. So, whereas there's people that might have been running for seven years and they might now run, you know they might run 10 times a week. You know a couple of two runs a day or something, and so, again, it's not Apple to Apple comparison. So I think we need to take that into understanding that things take time, but when you do have that unwavering focus on the opportunities that you want, it will enable you to be an outlier.

Speaker 1: 19:33

I did an episode on about talking about outliers just the other day as well. Number five the ability to quickly discard or modify your ideas is immensely valuable. So he goes on with a quote and says we are all learning modifying or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.

Speaker 1: 19:58

I think this this comes down to self awareness. I struggle with this because I like to like to plan everything out, I like to have numbers, I like to have facts, I like to have figures and I like to scenario, play things out and assume that they're going to go to that plan. But I've also learned since doing my business that things don't go to plan. You have to adjust, you have to apply different ways of thinking and you have to look at it from a different perspective. And look, having someone that you can talk to about this really does help to give you fresh perspective, because sometimes we get stuck in our little bias box and we don't see clearly. But being able to adjust, because, at the end of the day, if you want, if, if you're, if you're here down the bottom, if you're watching this, I'm pointing down at the bottom and let's say it's a triangle. Right, we're shaping a triangle Now at the bottom surface. Now you can go to two ways to the top of the triangle. You can either go the left side or the right side. Now it might mean you go out to each point, so you might go left, you might go right, but then you both go up to the top of the triangle.

Speaker 1: 21:02

I think something that we need to understand is is like sometimes, if we look at a triangle, it's not always going to be perfect each side. One way might be a bit longer, one way might be a bit shorter, and things like that. So, understanding that, look, are these going to get us to where we want to go? Yes, sometimes, when you look at it like, is this the smartest way, is this the quickest way? How long will it get us there? You might realize there's a better way of doing this. Therefore, it might be a better way to do it, smarter way to do it, but it might make you more uncomfortable. Does that mean you don't do it? No, you might need to adjust right.

Speaker 1: 21:38

And I think he's saying here the ability to quickly discard ideas or to modify your ideas is going to enable you to rapidly grow on the fly, because there's things that pop up always pop up and you have to make a decision. You have to be willing to make a decision because we're going to our destination, regardless how we're getting there sometimes might mean it's not always perfect, it's not always going to be the same, and it might mean you have to make a few little compromises until you get it right. And when I say compromises, not integrity, you know don't do anything dodgy, I'm just saying it's a workaround, it's a figure it out, let's make it happen, let's continue to move forward, and then you can say okay, now I have a solution, let's modify again and this makes more sense. I mean this completely makes sense to me. I'm always saying to people you know, from a reselling perspective and growing a business is, you need to be willing to pivot, willing to adjust, willing to try different things, willing to give things ago If you are selling a certain type of thing, only one niche again, you need to be willing to see how you can bring in a competitive advantage and not do it all the same way that everyone else is doing it, because it doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1: 22:47

The next one is number six. The cumulative effect of consistently improving yourself over time will lead to a better life, and his quote goes on to say spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up, day by day, and at the end of the day, if you live long enough, like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve. So, really, what he's trying to say is what you put in is what you will get out, and this is probably one of the most thrown around you know cliche things that has been thrown around the internet since atomic habits came out, and you know he spoke about that. You know, if you can do 1% better every day, you know you're going to have a huge growth level over an entire year. Now that's great.

Speaker 1: 23:36

I understand that saying this is one thing, doing it is hard. It really is hard to be consistently better or improving yourself, but there is a journey here that I think we miss. It's not about actually being better every day. It's about working to try and be better every day, and sometimes people do better, looking at this from the perspective of okay, what can I do today to get ahead, but what are the things that's going to get me to where I want to be at the end of the year? So some people look at it from a long term goal perspective and building you know, building that compounding effect to it whereas others like to focus on the day to day habits or habitual or routine things, systems that's going to enable them to then come out strong it's.

Speaker 1: 24:22

It works differently for everyone. For me, I think about it from like okay, well, if I want to do $100,000 in a year, you know this is how much I need to do per day. So what are the things I need to be doing per day to ensure that I'm getting that kind of result and I can start to put it into play? Whereas other people might build a system that says, okay, it's going to take me this long to do 100 items a day. You know how much time do I have to do it per day? So I need to spend five hours every day to do this. I'm going to build a process, a system and something that enables that to happen, and that way it's just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat and in theory it should get you to the same result. So there's different ways of looking at it, but the end of the day is what you put in is what you'll get out.

Speaker 1: 25:02

So if you're doing nothing, you will get nothing. Sometimes nothing is going okay, you know. For instance, doing nothing and just sleeping might be rest and it might means you recover. And then you didn't necessarily get nothing. You did get what you deserve from that. You got the rest, you got the recovery. Now you can get back to it.

Speaker 1: 25:22

But you can't expect to build a business if you're not doing any work. You can't expect to run a marathon if you're not doing any training. You can't expect to get the promotion if you're not showing up that you're ready to be promoted. You can't expect to, you know, have a garden if you're not out there sowing the seeds. You can't expect to do all these things you know, travel, have all these things in play if you're not willing to save up money for it, or if you're not willing to get a passport, or if you're not willing to get on the plane. There's so many, they seem stupid, they almost seem stupid. It's like, of course that makes sense, but the reality is we hold ourselves back.

Speaker 1: 25:58

You know we've come back to some of the other points here as well we're very quick to think why it won't work, or we complicate things, we overthink things, we don't ask for help, we don't look at how others have done it and we, you know we, we don't do it. And then you know we, 10 years down the line, we look. I regret I wish I had done that Hindsight. Anyway, I digress so across these six points. I think there's something here that we can all take away. I think there's. Again, this is his perspective. You know his own mental model, his own way of how he's been doing things. A lot of this will apply to investing. A lot of this will apply to different parts in life as well, and I think it's very interesting because I do speak about that.

Speaker 1: 26:40

You know, when we understand our core values, when we understand what we live life by, what are our things that we're wanting to work towards, like, what is our North Star? It gives us a compass, it gives us a map to help us pull back to and understand is this going to get me closer to where I want to be in five years, 10 years, two years, one year? And it helps keep yourself honest. But when you don't have those values, when you don't have those principles, when you don't have those things set in stone, it makes it very hard to enable yourself to stay a course Right. I mean the sailors when they used to travel the seas, they used to follow the stars to get to where they were going to navigate, before they had a compass, before they had a map. And it's the same thing. We need to have something that we can fall back to to enable us to say is this the right direction or is this not? And principles, in this case, they do help us.

Speaker 1: 27:28

Now, these again broad. Some will apply very, very detailed to you. Some of them will probably not, but I think there's a level of relevancy here that we can all take away and I would encourage you. What, what one, stuck out to you, what is a point here that you think? Oh, this is. I needed to hear that. Now let me know down in the comments below was it one, was it two, was it three? Was it four? Was it five? Was it six?

Speaker 1: 27:49

I think for me, the thing that I kind of get stuck up in is two and three. I get stuck up in, you know, overthinking things and trying to be too intelligent when really it's just just got to be simple, stupid and victim mentality is. Sometimes I hold myself back because I get so stuck in my head about certain things that when really I need to take more ownership of it or accountability of it to you know, take control of it. So those, those two, to me I think the ones that I've taken away from this that probably need the most work for me. The others I understand very well, actually understand them all very well. It's more around you know, application and applying them right. So I encourage you to go through these, listen to it again if you need to go through one to six and figure out what can you take away from this and how can you apply it to your life to help you further your lifestyle too.

Speaker 1: 28:35

If you've got any questions comments, chuck them down below or reach out. Get in contact. I also do have speakpipecom. Slash further your lifestyle. You can leave a voicemail, we can connect, have a conversation and also I can even integrate it into one of these episodes. Appreciate you being here. Appreciate you hanging out. Go check out one of the other episodes. Otherwise, if you enjoyed this, share it. Share it with someone if you think it will resonate with them and that they need to hear this. That would mean the absolute world to me. Appreciate you being here. You have a wonderful day. Cheers.