Ask most people what would make them happier, and they’ll describe something they want to add. It might be a raise, a bigger house, or the long trip they keep pushing back to next year.
Charlie Munger went the other way. He spent decades arguing that a decent life comes mostly from cutting out the stuff that makes people miserable, and he had earned the right to say it.
By his early thirties, Munger was divorced and short on money. He had also lost his young son to leukemia. He rebuilt his life from there and became Warren Buffett’s longtime partner at Berkshire Hathaway, along with one of the most quoted thinkers in investing and business.
His advice on happiness is blunt and a little unglamorous. Here are five things he thought you should let go of.
1. Let Go of High Expectations
“The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. That’s one you can easily arrange. And if you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable all your life.” – Charlie Munger
Munger said this at the Daily Journal annual meeting when he was 97. He added that he had been good at having low expectations and that it helped him.
People hear “low expectations” and picture someone who has quit trying. Munger meant something closer to realism. You can work as hard as you want on a goal and still accept that the world owes you nothing for the effort.
The payoff is mostly emotional. If you count on a promotion and miss it, the whole week is ruined. If you expected a long road with some bad breaks along the way, the same miss stings for an afternoon, and then you get back to work. A good surprise feels even better when you weren’t counting on it.
2. Let Go of Envy and Social Comparison
“Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is no great tragedy.” Charlie Munger
Munger had a low opinion of envy. In his words, “Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at.”
He had a point. Gluttony at least gets you a good meal. Envy makes you feel worse, and the person you’re envying has no idea it’s happening.
It wrecks judgment too. An envious investor stops asking whether a stock is worth the price and starts asking why a coworker made more money last year. That second question leads straight to chasing whatever happens to be hot.
So stop keeping score against other people. Check your own numbers against your own goals, and see the neighbor’s new truck as just a big debt payment you don’t want.
3. Let Go of Resentment and Self-Pity
“Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought.” Charlie Munger
That line comes from Munger’s 2007 commencement speech at the USC Gould School of Law. In the same talk, he said self-pity won’t improve your situation, even when the loss is as bad as a child dying of cancer. Coming from a man who had buried a son, that carried weight.
Self-pity feels comforting for about a day. After that, it keeps you parked in the same mental spot, replaying how unfair things were while the problem sits there untouched.
Resentment is worse because it hands your mood to someone else. The coworker who took credit for your project probably isn’t thinking about you at all, and neither is the relative who said something cruel at Thanksgiving. Munger’s fix was practical. Take whatever lesson the hit offers and focus on what you can still change.
4. Let Go of Bad Habits Through Inversion
“Invert, always invert.” – Charlie Munger
Munger picked up this habit from the German mathematician Carl Jacobi and applied it to stock picks and to his own life. Instead of asking how to be happy, you ask what reliably makes people miserable. Then you stop doing those things.
He liked to put it in a joke: “All I want to know is where I’m going to d*e, so I’ll never go there.” It gets a laugh, and it’s also the whole method.
Try it on your own week. Make a short list of what reliably leaves you worse off. For a lot of people, that list includes spending money they don’t have, saying yes to plans they’ll bail on, scrolling at 1 a.m., and one friend who always leaves them drained. Pick the worst item and quit it first.
Munger thought avoiding dumb mistakes beat chasing brilliance. “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.”
5. Let Go of Stagnation and Become a Learning Machine
“They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.” – Charlie Munger
Munger was describing people he had watched rise in life, again in that USC speech. He called them learning machines and said plenty of them weren’t especially brilliant. They just kept picking up a little more information and lessons every day.
He lived that way himself. Munger read constantly for most of his life and kept at it into his nineties, treating knowledge the way he treated money, as something that grows if you leave it alone long enough.
Feeling stuck makes people unhappy in a quiet, grinding way. Learning fixes some of that because you can see yourself getting better at something even when the rest of life is flat. Twenty minutes with a book before bed counts. So does a walk spent thinking through one problem with your phone left at home.
Conclusion
None of Munger’s advice costs money. Lower your expectations, stop comparing yourself to others, let go of grudges, cut the habits that hurt you, and keep learning.
That’s harder than it sounds, since most of these habits feel good in the moment or at least familiar. Munger lived to 99 and still had his dry sense of humor near the end, which says something about how well the approach held up for him.
Pick one item from this list and work on it this week. Envy is a good place to start, since Munger said it’s the one sin you’ll never have any fun with.