Thursday, April 10, 2014

React intelligently; take the results as they fall

A lesson from Charlie Munger, via notes from the 2013 Daily Journal Annual Meeting:
Therein lies a lesson in life. I think most lives work best when you simply react intelligently to the opportunities and difficulties you encounter, and just take the results as they fall. 
Some people think that by master planning, you will solve everything, but what I find is that the master plan gets a life of its own, and people believe it because they previously decided on that then, and they make all kinds of mistakes. 
(Thomas) Carlyle was a very smart man, and one of his favorite sayings was, the task of man is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what lies clearly at hand. (Ed: actual quote: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.”)