M&Ms: Charlie Munger's Best Idea

Running into Charlie Munger and his wisdom over the last two years has been life-changing. 

He recently passed away. May he rest in peace. But I want to share his most important idea and one great way I've found to apply it with you.

Munger’s ideas all came to me at a particularly tough and stressful period of my life, my transition from employee to entrepreneur. I'd later learn this was a blessing because you can completely reprogram yourself during periods of great stress.

But first, I'd like to tell you how I came into contact with Charlie's ideas.

If you want to become an entrepreneur these days, it's a good idea to find and carve out your own distribution channel(s). The ability to access even a small loyal distribution channel to test if an idea is any good is one of the biggest advantages of the modern era of entrepreneurship. A distribution channel is a reusable asset. Unlike, say, a failed idea that can suck up a lot of your time and resources and be of no use later. 

But the fact that self-built distribution channels are even possible to build today is "a Goddamn modern miracle," as Munger would say. Before this, one needed to beg someone for capital to buy ads to get any meaningful distribution.

But to have a chance of building a distribution channel, you've got to roll up your sleeves and dive into the metaphorical crap, which is the modern Internet and social media. 

But it's not all bad. There are many gems inside this overflowing river of crap.

One such gem is the countless Charlie Munger fans on the Internet curating his ideas via bite-sized tweets, newsletters, and essays. By the way, humans turn out to be the best, most reliable curators of real value on the Internet, not the algorithms. And I say this to you as a "Computer Scientist" when you find the good ones, follow humans, not algorithms.

But once I came into contact with Charlie's ideas, thanks to the Internet, I could sense in my gut they were special.

The stress of the venture-backed startup not going well did something to me two years ago. This startup was the one I quit my cushy high-paying job to start. But around that time, I became obsessed with every rabbit hole Charlie Munger recommended. I didn't just read Poor Charlie's Almanac (which has a revised Stripe press edition coming out on Tuesday) but also nearly every book Charlie recommended. I read Darwin, Pavlov, Harvey Firestone, and Benjamin Franklin. I have become friends with many more eminent dead, thanks to Charlie Munger, over the last two years.

But I won't bore you with that list. Instead, I'd like to tell you about the most important idea I picked up from Charlie Munger: 

"Become multi-disciplinary."― Charles T. Munger

In Poor Charlie's Almanac, Charlie explains how a self-described average intelligent person like him could go on to run laps around the world's best living experts. And it's all because they've got blinders on from their field of expertise. According to Charlie, most experts from one field don't bother studying and learning the basic principles of other fields. But Charlie did. He studied the 101 & 102 level classes of every field. And Charlie Munger says this is all you need.

"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."― Charles T. Munger.

Charlie is why I started taking basic classes online. I've been taking basic classes in Physics, Biology, Psychology, Economics, Marketing, etc., and taking them seriously. 

"Take a simple idea and take it seriously." ― Charles T. Munger.

The blinders of 15 years of Software Engineering and a Master of Science in Computer Science started coming off me. The blinders put on me by my employers started coming off me, too. Thank God the blinders started coming off because I would've likely failed as an entrepreneur if they hadn't.

Warren Buffett said on a Berkshire Hathaway investor call from the 1990s, "I find it extraordinary that so many smart people (Academics) only study what is measurable, rather than what is meaningful." Then his friend and partner Charlie Munger looked at him and replied, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." 

To the man who knows only the models and principles of one field, as I did for a long time, only those models and principles can be used to solve all problems.

But, having gone through it, I can tell you it's not enough to read the books and to take the courses.

"All skills attenuate with disuse."― Charles T. Munger.

As Harvey Firestone wrote in 1926 in Men and Rubber, "[People] coming out of college ... may have the latent power to think, but they have nothing [important] to think about."

We need a place to use Charlie Munger's best idea of becoming multi-disciplinary.

But the Internet turns out to have true power to help us use Charlie's multi-disciplinary approach.

I started this newsletter six months before quitting my job to become an entrepreneur. And it became a forcing function for me to have good things to write about. To grow this newsletter and my social media presence, I suddenly had a good place to use the principles I was learning from human psychology, marketing, and sales.

I needed to pull in better metaphors to become a better writer and a more useful writer. Some of those came from Physics, like the idea of friction, momentum, energy transfer, and so many others that improved my writing and seem to apply to so much more than the physical world.

And now, as an entrepreneur, I get to use Charlie's best idea everywhere. I get to use it when I am selling, in product building, in my philosophy. 

But you don't need to be an entrepreneur to use his idea of becoming multi-disciplinary. I started using them here in this newsletter and building an audience before I quit to become an entrepreneur.

But I am not the only one. 

Take my friend Aakash Gupta, who writes

Product Growth

, an awesome product management newsletter here on Substack. He started writing that newsletter around the same time I started mine. Then, when Affirm, the company he was at, had layoffs like so many other tech companies these last few years, it impacted Aakash. But he built up his assets. He had built up a network and demonstrated competence publically. He had to build up many new multi-disciplinary skills in that process. Best of all, he flipped on the paid feature for his Substack after the layoffs and had an instant income stream and time and resources to find the perfect role for himself. 

There are so many other stories like this of the internet enabling independence. 

But this may be why Charlie Munger's ideas are so popular on the internet.

When Charlie Munger went into business, he did not do it to become rich. He did it to become independent, to become free. Wealth was simply a by-product of running laps around everyone else who chose not to think like him, using a multi-disciplinary approach.

But what of the fears of what others might think of us for sharing our ideas online? And what if we look foolish while becoming multi-disciplinary? Charlie had something to say about this, too:

"Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group… then to hell with them."― Charles T. Munger

But his best idea can help us all carve our own path today. And it is more applicable than ever.

I'll forever be grateful to Charlie Munger for freely sharing his wisdom with me. While it's sad the world lost such a great mind recently, I suspect his ideas will go on to change countless lives for generations.

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A Promo from Me:

Charlie Munger, borrowing from Medicine, once said, “In medical education, The learner is forced to ‘see one, do one, and then teach one,’ with the teaching pounding the learning into the teacher.”

Or, as the famous Chinese Proverb says: “When one person teaches another, two people learn.”

This was the reason, my friend

Chris Wong

and I decided to start teaching The Newsletter Launchpad two years ago so we could learn faster.

But now, this will be our fifth time teaching this multi-week class.

It is no exaggeration to say that we have helped hundreds of people start writing their newsletters. Over 50 newsletters were started last cohort alone.

But best of all, Cohort 5 of the Newsletter Launchpad is included with a Small Bets membership.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a newsletter, you should join Small Bets and sign up for our class. And if you are already in Small Bets, we will see you tomorrow. Chris and I, along with our classmates, will be giving feedback on every edition of the newsletters published during the cohort. We believe there is no better way to start a newsletter and improve at this internet game than this.

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One Thing: My favorite share on Charlie Munger’s life.

George Mack shared his favorite Charlie Munger story.

The man was born right before the great depression in 1924 and lived through all of that with some incredible personal hardship early on.

This brings forward an important thing I’ve come to believe:

The tougher the life, the greater the wisdom that will come from it.

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Three Memes: A Fun Ad, Rocks, Wake Up

I gotta admit, this is a pretty good ad.

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My friend Bojan points out that there are far too many Rocks in this one picture.

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My kids, whom I love very much, getting ready to annoy me as soon as I wake up on the weekends.

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-Louie

P.S. You can reply to this email; it will get to me, and I will read it.