Charlie Munger on the Power of Avoidance

Charlie Munger at the 2019 Daily Journal Meeting, How do you scramble out of your mistakes without them costing too much? And we’ve done some of that too. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway, think of its founding businesses. A doomed department store, a doomed New England textile company, and a doomed trading stamp company. […]

Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awardees

The Futility Closet notes, Only nine people have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award: Mel Brooks John Gielgud Marvin Hamlisch Helen Hayes Audrey Hepburn Rita Moreno Mike Nichols Jonathan Tunick Richard Rodgers If you count honorary awards, then Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli also qualify. If you count “daytime Emmys,” […]

Human Triumph Over Dehumanizing Pressures

In 1965, the American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren reviewed Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952): No one has made more unrelenting statements of the dehumanizing pressures that have been put upon the Negro. And Invisible Man is, I should say, the most powerful artistic representation we have of the Negro under these dehumanizing […]

New Year’s Resolutions Are Stupid

The Federalist contributor Jacob Trunnell wonders why people continue to repeat making New Year’s resolutions every year—as though just making about those resolutions and bragging about them is in itself a sense of self-accomplishment: I hate New Year’s resolutions. They are a polite conversation piece while at a party with friends and family. It is […]

Learning by

British philosopher Alan Watts writes in The Joyous Cosmology (2013): The transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of […]

Doing the Right Thing

From an interview with Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in the field of systems thinking, on efficiency and effectiveness, Peter Drucker said ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’ Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the […]

Driven Away from a Simple Life in Nature

Sereno Sky writes in Lonely Traveller (2014,) Not only is the industrial revolution driving people away from a simple life in nature, it’s beginning to drive them crazy with more and more stress that continued economic growth requires. The worst thing is that people and governments have gotten addicted to this race for materialism, and […]

Assessing the Range of Outcomes

At the 2020 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett speaks about (transcript) range of outcomes and probability to help assess risk and reward. It’s a matter of figuring out what’s possible versus what’s likely to happen, But in any event, the range of probabilities on health narrowed down somewhat, I would say the range, the […]

Berkshire Hathaway Stays Cautious Amid Coronavirus Crisis

After the 2020 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times comments about Warren Buffet’s warnings not to be overconfident in predicting what the future might hold: What is driving Mr. Buffett’s caution? In truth, he has always been cautious. He has always been more willing to lose out on an […]

A Good Question Beats a Good Answer

Fast Company’s Alan Webber summarizes nuggets of wisdom from his Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self (2009.) Rule #10: “A good question beats a good answer.” You don’t have to have all the answers. But you can make an enormously valuable contribution by asking good questions. When others […]