Charlie Munger died in November 2023, about a month shy of his 100th birthday. He spent decades as Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, and he stayed sharp, funny, and blunt right up to the end.
People who expect a list of happiness tips from Munger usually walk away surprised. He had no morning routine to sell and no slogan about positive thinking.
He had a tool he called inversion. Rather than ask how to be happy, he asked what reliably makes people miserable and then did his best to stay far away from it.
He liked to joke that all he wanted to know was where he was going to pass away, so he’d never go there. Point that same thinking at old age, and five habits stand out as the ones worth dropping.
1. Envy and Social Comparison
Munger thought envy was the dumbest of the deadly sins. He called it a really stupid sin because “it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at.” Gluttony gives you a good meal before the regret shows up. Envy skips the good part and goes straight to the misery.
In his 1986 commencement speech at the Harvard School in Los Angeles, Munger handed the graduates a tongue-in-cheek list of prescriptions for a guaranteed miserable life, and envy made the cut. Someone will always have a bigger house or a better portfolio than you do. Chasing those people never ends. At 70, you can still find a neighbor with a nicer car.
Munger’s answer was to keep score against your own past self. If you know more than you did a year ago and are making progress toward your goals, what the guy down the street bought matters very little.
2. Resentment and Self-Pity
Munger had plenty of reasons to feel sorry for himself. In his early thirties, his first marriage ended in divorce, and not long after that, his young son Teddy died of leukemia. Decades later, a complication from cataract surgery cost him the sight in one eye. Most people would have forgiven him for a few bitter years.
He wouldn’t allow it. In his 2007 commencement address at the USC Gould School of Law, he told the graduates that “envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought.”
He went on to say that self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia. In his view, any time you catch yourself sliding into it, you should stop right there because it never fixes a single thing. Munger was a fan of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Like Epictetus, he treated each bad break as a chance to behave well.
Anyone who lives long enough piles up losses. Friends die, health slips, and plans fall apart, and the people who keep replaying those hits tend to have a harder time in their later years than those who take the punch and get back to work.
3. Unrealistic Expectations
Munger often said low expectations are the first rule of a happy life. People who expect too much, in his telling, set themselves up for years of disappointment. Some readers hear that and assume he was telling people to stop trying.
That doesn’t fit a man who was one of the most disciplined investors of the last century and worked hard well into his nineties. He wanted people to work hard and stay realistic at the same time. Do your best, then accept that the world won’t always pay you back on your timeline.
Expect too much and every ordinary setback feels like a betrayal. Expect a reasonable amount, and good news becomes a pleasant surprise.
This gets more useful with age. With age, your body changes, and the grandkids move three states away, and a person who expected otherwise has a lot more to be upset about.
4. Tolerating Unreliable or Dishonest People
Munger cared a great deal about reliability. In that same Harvard School speech, being unreliable showed up on his list of ways to make yourself miserable.
He believed dependability could cover for a lot of other weaknesses. If you show up when you say you will and do what you promise, people trust you, and that trust makes everything from business deals to friendships run more smoothly.
The reverse is also true. People who lie, flake, or never follow through wear you down, and Munger had little patience for keeping them around. Your time and peace of mind get more valuable every year. Handing them to a friend who cancels every plan or a partner who stretches the truth is a bad trade at any age, and a worse one at 75.
Munger and Buffett ran Berkshire largely on trust, often doing big deals on a handshake with managers they believed in. They picked honest people and then left them alone to do the work.
5. Intellectual Stagnation
Munger read all the time. He went through science, history, psychology, biographies, and business with the same appetite, and he kept at it into his nineties.
In his USC speech, he described the people he’d watched rise in life. “They are learning machines,” he said, and they go to bed each night a little wiser than when they got up.
He added that the habit pays off most when you have a long run ahead of you. Munger got nearly a full century, which gave that compounding plenty of time to work.
A lot of people stop learning once work slows down. They lean on what they figured out in their thirties, and their world gets smaller year by year. The fix is cheap. Pick up a book on a subject you know nothing about, or argue with an old opinion of yours and see if it still holds up.
Conclusion
Munger didn’t add much to his life to stay happy. He took things away, and the things he cut were envy, self-pity, inflated expectations, unreliable people, and a lazy mind.
He followed that approach for close to 100 years. Near the end, he was still showing up to the Berkshire and Daily Journal meetings, answering questions for hours and making the crowd laugh with one-liners most people half his age couldn’t pull off.