friends among the eminent dead, but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just being given the basic concepts.2
Making friends with the eminent dead and the great thinkers of the past is a highly rewarding exercise. Morgan Housel writes:
Everything’s been done before. The scenes change but the behaviors and outcomes don’t. Historian Niall Ferguson’s plug for his profession is that “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” The biggest lesson from the 100 billion people who are no longer alive is that they tried everything we’re trying. The details were different, but they tried to outwit entrenched competition. They swung from optimism to pessimism at the worst times. They battled unsuccessfully against reversion to the mean. They learned that popular things seem safe because so many people are involved, but they’re most dangerous because they’re most competitive. Same stuff that guides today, and will guide tomorrow. History is abused when specific events are used as a guide to the future. It’s way more useful as a benchmark for how people react to risk and incentives, which is pretty stable over time.3
The more you read, the more you build your mental repertoire. Incrementally, the knowledge you add to your stockpile will grow over time as it combines with everything new you put in there. This is compounding in action, and it works with knowledge in much the same way as it does with interest. Eventually, when faced with new, challenging, or ambiguous situations, you will be able to draw on this dynamic inner repository, or what Munger refers to as a “latticework of mental models.”4 (Mental models are an explanation of how things work, what variables matter in a given situation, and how they interact with one another. Mental models are how we make sense of the world.) You will then respond as someone whose instincts and judgment have been honed by the experiences of others, rather than just your own. You will start to see that nothing is truly new, that incredible challenges can and have been overcome, and that there are fundamental truths about how the world works.
So, learn from others. Figure out where you are going and find out who has been there before. Knowledge comes from experience, but it doesn’t have to be your experience.
Creating Time to Read, Learn, and Think
Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of a life. But we’ve turned that quirk into a positive outcome for ourselves. We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.
—Charlie Munger
The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.
—Warren Buffett
The rich have money. The wealthy have control over their time. And time is the scarcest resource, because of its nonrenewability. Time is a universally depleting resource, reduced at the same rate for the wealthy as for the poor. This gives us one way of defining a successful investor, as a person for whom time has become a more binding constraint than money. The ultimate status symbol is time. Time is the new money.
My friends and colleagues often ask me how I manage to find so much time for reading while having a full-time job and managing my household chores.
For starters, I hardly watch television. I don’t even have a cable television connection. I get all my desired content on Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime. I watch only those select few movies, documentaries, and shows that truly pique my interest. I ensure that I don’t spend a lot of time commuting to my workplace. I live in an area where I can walk to the grocery store, finish my purchases, and return home in less than twenty minutes. I have fully automated the monthly payments online for my phone, electricity, Internet, utilities, and meal plan bills.
All these choices are deliberate.
If you assume that the average person spends two hours a day watching television, an hour for commuting, and another two hours a week shopping, that adds up to twenty-three hours a week.
Twenty-three hours. That is 1,380 minutes. That is a lot of time. If you read a page in two minutes, that’s almost seven hundred pages a week. Do seven hundred pages a week sound like too much for you? Well, how about just twenty-five pages a day? Shane Parrish writes:
While most of us don’t have the time to read a whole book in one sitting, we do have the time to read 25 pages a day. Reading the right books, even if it’s a few pages a day, is one of the best ways to ensure that you go to bed a little smarter than you woke up.
Twenty-five pages a day doesn’t sound like much, but this commitment adds up over time. Let’s say that two days out of each month, you probably won’t have time to read. Plus Christmas. That gives you 340 days a year of solid reading time. If you read 25 pages a day for 340 days, that’s 8,500 pages. 8,500. What I have also found is that when I commit to a minimum of 25 pages, I almost always read more. So let’s call the 8,500 pages 10,000. (I only need to extend the daily 25 pages into 30 to get there.)
With 10,000 pages a year, at a general pace of 25/day, what can we get done?
Well, The Power Broker is 1,100 pages. The four LBJ books written by Robert Caro are collectively 3,552 pages. Tolstoy’s two masterpieces—War and Peace, and Anna Karenina—come in at a combined 2,160. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is six volumes and runs to about 3,660 pages. That’s 10,472 pages.
That means, in about one year, at a modest pace of 25 pages a day, you’d have knocked out 13 masterful works and learned an enormous amount about the history of the world. In one year!
That leaves the following year to read Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1,280), Carl Sandburg’s Six Volumes on Lincoln (2,000), Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations unabridged (1,200), and Boswell’s Johnson (1,300), with plenty of pages left to read something else.
This is how the great works get read: day by day, 25 pages at a time. No excuses…
The point of assigning yourself a certain amount of reading every day is to create a deeply held habit. The 25-pages-a-day thing is a habit-former!…
…Read what seems awesome and interesting to you now and let your curiosities grow organically. A lifelong interest in truth, reality, and knowledge will lead you down so many paths, you should never need to force yourself to read anything unless there is a very, very specific reason. (Perhaps to learn a specific skill for a job.)
Not only is this approach way more fun, but it works really, really well. It keeps you reading. It keeps you interested. And in the words of Nassim Taleb, “Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction; magnified by attempts to satisfy it.”
Thus, paradoxically, as you read more books, your pile of unread books will get larger, not smaller. That’s because your curiosity will grow with every great read.
This is the path of the lifelong learner.5
This is compounding wisdom in action. This is how you become smarter. You must value your time very highly.
You’ve got to keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.
—Warren Buffett
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