Charlie Munger spent decades as Warren Buffett’s partner and the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. He died in November 2023 at age 99, and people still quote him all the time, mostly about investing.
His advice on how to live gets far less attention, which is a shame. Munger thought small mental habits added up over a lifetime the same way money does in a good portfolio, and the five below come straight from his own words. If you want to improve the quality of your life, focus on building these 5 daily habits.
1. Go to Bed a Little Wiser Every Day
Munger treated learning as a daily chore, like brushing your teeth. School was only the start for him, and he kept at it into his late nineties.
He put it plainly at the USC law school graduation in 2007. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step, you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts.”
Look at that last line again. He never promised quick results, and most people quit right around the time they realize none are coming.
In the same speech, Munger told the graduates he kept watching people get ahead who weren’t especially brilliant. He called them learning machines and said, “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.”
One easy way to start is to name a single thing before bed that you didn’t know at breakfast. Some nights it will be tiny. A better way to handle a difficult coworker counts, and so does a fact you picked up from an article at lunch.
2. Read Voraciously
Munger read constantly, and so did Buffett. He didn’t think a person could get wise any other way.
Charlie Munger was blunt about it. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time, none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads, and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
His reading went well past finance. He worked through psychology, history, biology, physics, and biographies, then pulled the big ideas from each into what he called a latticework of mental models.
That latticework had a practical purpose. Someone who only knows one field tends to force every problem into the shape of that field, and they miss things a more widely read person would catch in a few seconds.
You don’t need hours a day. Twenty pages after dinner can turn into a lot of books over a few years, especially if you switch subjects instead of reading the same kind of book again and again.
3. Practice Inversion
Munger borrowed this idea from the German mathematician Carl Jacobi, who liked to say “invert, always invert.” You flip a problem upside down and ask what would make things go badly.
Munger had a joke about it that he repeated for years. “All I want to know is where I’m going to d*e, so I’ll never go there.”
He meant it more seriously than it sounds. Avoiding dumb mistakes was easier than being brilliant, he argued, and it worked more often. In Charlie Munger’s words, “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.”
Try it on your health first. Picture what you would do if you wanted to wreck your body in five years, and most people can list it in under a minute: smoking, skipping sleep, fast food, junk food, and getting no exercise.
That list doubles as a list of things to stop. The same trick works for money and marriages, so before any big decision, spend a few minutes imagining the potential long-term outcomes.
4. Drop Envy, Resentment, and Self-Pity
Munger had no patience for certain emotions. He thought they hurt the person feeling them and gave nothing back.
“Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought,” Charlie Munger said. He saved his sharpest words for envy: “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.”
Envy keeps your eyes on somebody else’s life. Resentment keeps you chewing on something that already happened, and the person you resent usually has no idea you’re doing it.
Munger had real reasons to feel sorry for himself. His young son Teddy died of leukemia in the 1950s, and decades later, he lost sight in one eye after complications from cataract surgery.
He still refused to wallow in his tragedy. He warned that “self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse.” When you catch yourself sliding into one of these moods, call it what it is and go do something useful.
5. Keep Low, Realistic Expectations
This one sounds gloomy at first. Munger meant it as a recipe for being content.
Charlie Munger said, “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.”
He wasn’t telling anyone to coast. Munger worked hard well into old age and held himself to tough standards in business, while keeping his assumptions about how the world would treat him modest.
That small shift changes how good news feels. A raise or a strong year in the market becomes a pleasant surprise, and a bad stretch hurts less because you expected some of it.
Each morning, do the work in front of you and loosen your grip on the outcome a little. Over time, you’ll probably find yourself more grateful for what you already have.
Conclusion
None of these habits are complicated. They’re hard because you have to keep at them for years before the payoff shows up, and most of us get bored long before then.
Munger practiced them for most of his 99 years. He read, he kept learning, he dodged obvious mistakes, and he didn’t expect the world to hand him anything.
Start with one habit this week instead of all five. Pick the one that bothers you most, whether that’s the envy or the unread stack of books on your nightstand, and give it a month before adding another.