What was Charlie Munger's advice for a good life?

Munger's advice was to invert: figure out precisely what would guarantee a miserable life — being unreliable, envious, resentful, self-pitying, closed-minded, learning nothing from others, and quitting after setbacks — and then do the exact opposite. Positively stated, the safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want, the first rule of a happy life is low expectations, and you should keep learning your entire life while associating with people you admire.

Which three of Munger's misery prescriptions came from Johnny Carson?

Munger explicitly credited Johnny Carson with the first three ways to guarantee a miserable life: ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception, envy, and resentment. Munger said resentment "has always worked for me exactly as it worked for Carson." The remaining prescriptions — unreliability, learning only from your own experience, and staying down after setbacks — were Munger's own additions.

What did Munger say is the first rule of a happy life?

"The first rule of a happy life is low expectations," Munger said at the 2019 Daily Journal meeting. He argued that unrealistic expectations make people miserable, so the durable path to contentment is to hold reasonable expectations and accept life's results as they come — the same idea he distilled in his 1986 closing toast, "may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low."

His prescription for a good life

Munger on how to live

Q: What are Munger's prescriptions for a miserable life?

In his 1986 Harvard School commencement speech, Munger listed prescriptions to guarantee misery. The first three he credited to Johnny Carson: ingesting chemicals to alter mood or perception, envy, and resentment. He then added his own: be unreliable and don't do what you promised; learn only from your own experience while ignoring the vicarious lessons of others, living and dead; and go down and stay down after your first, second, or third severe setback. Each is meant to be inverted into real advice — be reliable, learn from everyone, and get back up.

Q: What did Munger mean by 'to get what you want, deserve what you want'?

It was the core of his 2007 USC Law School commencement advice. His exact words were, "the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want" — meaning the reliable route to trust, clients, and reputation is to earn them by becoming genuinely worthy, not by scheming for them. He summed up the aim as delivering to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end, building toward what he called a "seamless web of deserved trust."

Charlie Munger's advice on how to live was every bit as sharp as his advice on how to invest, and it leaned on his single favorite trick: inversion. Rather than lecture graduates on the secret to happiness, he would spell out — step by step — exactly how to guarantee a miserable life, and let them draw the obvious conclusion by turning each prescription upside down. Nearly all of it comes from two commencement speeches: the savage 1986 Harvard School address on how to guarantee misery, and the warm 2007 USC Law School address on how to build a good life.

Short answer. Charlie Munger said the surest route to a good life is to work out exactly how to guarantee a miserable one — being unreliable, envious, resentful, self-pitying, and closed-minded, and quitting after your first setbacks — and then rigorously do the opposite; above all, he said, the safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want, and the first rule of a happy life is low expectations.

How did Munger say to find the good life? Invert.

Munger's method for a good life was the same one he used for a hard business problem: invert, always invert. Instead of asking how to be happy and successful — a question he thought too vague to be useful — he asked the opposite question, how to be guaranteed miserable, because the recipe for disaster is concrete and easy to list. Avoid every item on that list and, he argued, you are most of the way to a good life by subtraction.

He built his most famous life talk, the 1986 Harvard School commencement, entirely around this move, borrowing the frame from Johnny Carson: Carson had told graduates he could not tell them how to be happy, but he could tell them from personal experience how to be miserable. Munger took the same premise and ran it to the end, delivering a full set of 'prescriptions for a guaranteed miserable life' — a demonstration of the very technique it preached.

Sources

Charlie Munger, Harvard School (Los Angeles) commencement address, "How to Guarantee a Life of Misery," June 13, 1986 (Poor Charlie's Almanack, Talk One)
James Clear, "Great Speeches" — verified transcript of the 1986 address

What are Munger's prescriptions for a miserable life?

Munger opened by crediting Johnny Carson with the first three ways to guarantee misery: ingesting chemicals to alter mood or perception; envy; and resentment. Of the last he added, deadpan, that "resentment has always worked for me exactly as it worked for Carson. I cannot recommend it highly enough to you if you desire misery." The inverted lesson is plain — stay clear of mind-altering dependency, and refuse to indulge envy and resentment at all.

Then he supplied his own additions. "First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do," he said — one habit that, mastered, "will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues." His second prescription was "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" — the opposite of reading widely and learning from other people's mistakes. His third was to "go down and stay down when you get your first, second, third severe reverse in the battle of life" — to quit and wallow instead of soldiering through. Read backwards, the maxims become: be scrupulously reliable, learn vicariously from everyone, and get back up after every setback.

Sources

Charlie Munger, Harvard School commencement, "How to Guarantee a Life of Misery," June 13, 1986 (Poor Charlie's Almanack, Talk One) — Carson's three prescriptions (chemicals, envy, resentment) and Munger's additions (unreliability, learning only from own experience, staying down after setbacks)

What did Munger mean by 'to get what you want, deserve what you want'?

The spine of Munger's positive advice, delivered at the 2007 USC Law School commencement, is a rule he called almost fail-safe: "the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want." The idea, widely paraphrased as 'to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want,' is that the reliable path to trust, clients, and reputation is not to chase them but to become the kind of person and provider who has earned them — to "deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end."

This is the constructive face of his warning against unreliability. Its endpoint, for Munger, was a civic ideal he returned to again and again: "the highest form which civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust." He paired the principle with hard practical counsel — pursue assiduity, which he defined as loving the word because "it means sit down on your ass until you do it"; work under and alongside people you admire, and "particularly avoid working directly under somebody you don't admire and don't want to be like"; and treat the acquisition of wisdom as "a moral duty," not merely a career tactic, which in turn hooks you into learning for life.

Sources

Charlie Munger, USC Gould School of Law commencement address, May 13, 2007 (Poor Charlie's Almanack) — "safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want"; "deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end"; assiduity; wisdom acquisition as a moral duty
"Seamless web of deserved trust" — 2007 USC Law commencement; the theme also recurs across his Berkshire and Daily Journal remarks

Avoid envy, resentment, and self-pity

Across both speeches Munger hammered the same short list of poisons. "Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought," he told the USC graduates. "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." His counsel was to catch the feeling early and refuse it, no matter how justified the grievance.

Envy drew his sharpest line: "Envy is a really stupid sin because it's the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There's a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?" He also urged avoiding "extremely intense ideology," because, he said, it "cabbages up one's mind" — the ideologue loses the ability to see reality straight. Reliability belongs on the same list by its absence: failing people in their reasonable expectations is a sure way to make them turn on you.

Sources

Charlie Munger, USC Gould School of Law commencement address, May 13, 2007 (Poor Charlie's Almanack) — "envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought"; "self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia"; the "stupid sin" line on envy; the warning against intense ideology ("cabbages up one's mind")

Why did Munger say the first rule of a happy life is low expectations?

Munger's most practical happiness rule was almost anti-inspirational: "The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you're going to be miserable your whole life." He argued that the reliable way to be content is not to engineer better circumstances but to hold reasonable expectations and take life's results, good and bad, as they fall — an attitude he traced to the Stoic Epictetus, who treated every misfortune as a chance to behave well.

He closed the 1986 misery speech with a toast that captured the whole inverted philosophy in one line: "Gentlemen, may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low." Set your expectations modestly, refuse the toxic emotions, and let a good life accumulate — that, for Munger, was the durable formula, and he practiced it into his late nineties.

Sources

Charlie Munger, Daily Journal Corporation annual meeting, 2019 — "The first rule of a happy life is low expectations"
Charlie Munger, Harvard School commencement, June 13, 1986 (Poor Charlie's Almanack, Talk One) — closing toast, "may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low"

Keep learning, and associate with people better than you

The last plank of Munger's good life was relentless learning. "I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines," he told the USC class. "They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up." Because wisdom acquisition was for him a moral duty, it followed that you are "hooked for lifetime learning" — you advance not on what you already know but on what you keep learning after you leave school.

Learning, in his telling, was inseparable from the company you keep. He advised working under and alongside people you admire, marrying and befriending people better than you, and building the two-track habit of mind he described in his 1994 USC 'Worldly Wisdom' talk — first asking "what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered," and second, "what are the subconscious influences" quietly steering the brain toward wrong conclusions. Combine deserved trust, low expectations, freedom from envy and self-pity, and lifelong learning in good company, and you have Munger's entire prescription for a life that works.

Sources

Charlie Munger, USC Gould School of Law commencement address, May 13, 2007 (Poor Charlie's Almanack) — "learning machines"; wisdom acquisition as a moral duty; "hooked for lifetime learning"
Charlie Munger, "A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates to Investment Management & Business," USC (1994), Poor Charlie's Almanack, Talk Two — the "two-track analysis" of rational factors plus subconscious psychological influences

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