# “How to Guarantee a Life of Misery”

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## Metadata
- Author: [[Charlie Munger]]
- Full Title: “How to Guarantee a Life of Misery”
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/how-to-guarantee-a-life-of-misery-by-charlie-munger

## Highlights
- What Carson said was that he couldn’t tell the graduating class how to be happy, but he could tell them from personal experience how to guarantee misery.
- 1) Ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception;
  2) Envy; and
  3) Resentment.
- The four closest friends of my youth were highly intelligent, ethical, humorous types, favoured in person and background.
- Two are long dead, with alcohol a contributing factor, and a third is a living alcoholic -if you call that living.
- Envy, of course, joins chemicals in winning some sort of quantity price for causing misery
- Johnson spoke well when he said that life is hard enough to swallow without squeezing in the bitter rind of resentment.
- Disraeli, as he rose to become one of the greatest Prime Ministers, learned to give up vengeance as a motivation for action, but he did retain some outlet for resentment by putting the names of people who wronged him on pieces of paper in a drawer. Then, from time to time, he reviewed these names and took pleasure in noting the way the world had taken his enemies down without his assistance.
- First, be unreliable.
- If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for you. Master this one habit and you can always play the role of the hare in the fable, except that instead of being outrun by one fine turtle you will be outrun by hordes and hordes of mediocre turtles and even by some mediocre turtles on crutches.
- Later, in ignominious captivity, as he prepared to be burned alive, he said: “Well now do I remember the words of the historian Solon: “No man’s life should be accounted a happy one until it is over.”
- My second prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead.
- How little originality there is in the common disasters of mankind -drunk driving deaths, reckless driving maimings, incurable venereal diseases, conversion of bright college students into brainwashed zombies as members of destructive cults, business failures through repetition of obvious mistakes made by predecessors, various forms of crowd folly, and so on.
- The other aspect of avoiding vicarious wisdom is the rule for not learning from the best work done before yours. The prescription is to become as non-educated as you reasonable can
- There once was a man who assiduously mastered the work of his best predecessors, despite a poor start and very tough time in analytic geometry.
- “If I have seen a little farther than other men it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
- My third prescription for misery is to go down and stay down when you get your first, second, third severe reverse in the battle of life
- Ignore at all cost the lesson contained in the accurate epitaph written for himself by Epictetus: “Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favoured by Gods.”
- Most people smile (as you did) at the rustic’s ignorance and ignore his basic wisdom.
- What Carson did was to approach the study of how to create X by turning the question backward, that is, by studying how to create non-X.
- "It is in the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward
- The life of Darwin demonstrates how a turtle may outrun the hares, aided by extreme objectivity, which helps the objective person end up like the only player without blindfold in a game of pin-the-donkey
- Einstein said that his successful theories came from: “Curiosity, concentration, perseverance and self-criticism. And by self-criticism he meant the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.