Archives of “charles darwin” tag

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CHARLES T. MUNGER AND THE PRESCRIPTION FOR A LIFE OF MISERY

  
Analysis, Education
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On June 13, 1986 Charles T. Munger delivered the commencement address at Harvard University.

In it, Munger borrows from an earlier commencement address by the late night host Johnny Carson.  Carson shared with the  graduating class that although he could not not tell them how to be happy, he could share with them from personal experience how to be miserable.

Carson’s prescription for a life of misery?

  1. ingestion of  chemicals to alter mood or perception
  2. envy
  3. resentment

Munger adds to Carson’s prescription with four more ways to guarantee a life of misery:

  1. be unreliable: do not faithfully do what you have promised yourself or others
  2. learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you can learn from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead
  3. go down and stay down when you get your first, second, and third severe reverse in the battle of life (i.e., if at first you do not succeed then do not try again)
  4. ignore evidence contrary to your opinion by remaining certain in your views

I share the speech here in its entirety: 

Now the Headmaster Berrisford has selected one of the oldest and longest-serving trustees to make a commencement speech, it behooves the speaker to address two questions in every mind:

1) Why was such a selection made? and,

2) How long is the speech going to last? (more…)

Learn 5 Things From Charles Darwin

  
Education, Life
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[1] Human brain jumps to conclusions based on vividness and recency of events. It ignores things that cannot be easily recalled however important that fact may be. Darwin understood this and avoided availability bias.

[2] You can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. Darwin understood this and organized his body of knowledge so that it was available to him when needed.

[3] Darwin is assiduous and he does not give up on things very easily.

[4] You can’t come up with theory of evolution by following the wisdom of crowds. Darwin avoided social proof and instead relied on his own thinking faculties.

[5] He does not fall in love with his own ideas. He pays special attention to evidence that disconfirms his belief. This is one of the greatest qualities to have. I have not seen many people (including myself) with this quality. It is really hard.

The takeaway lesson is that even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop Darwin’s thinking habits.

Inspirational Quotes

  
Education, Life
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1. “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein

2. “Act now. There is never any time but now, and there never will be any time but now.” – Wallace Wattles

3. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

4. “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering the attitudes of his mind.” – William James

5. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin

6. “There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” – Nelson Mandela

7. “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” – Robert Frost

8. “You’ve got to win in your mind before you win in your life.” – John Addison

9. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin

10. “An ounce of doing things is worth a pound of theorizing.” – Wallace Wattles

11. “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill

12. “Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.” – Stephen Covey

13. “The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.” – Joseph Joubert

14. ”Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” – Winston Churchill

15. “Don’t wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel Stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself.” – Dara Henderson

16. “Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” – Jim Rohn

17. “Vision without action is just a dream, action without vision just passes the time, vision with action can change the world” – Nelson Mandela

18. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T.S. Eliot

19. “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde

20. “Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose yours.” – Paulo Coelho

21. “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – John F. Kennedy

22. “I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.” – James Joyce

23. “I have learned that it’s not WHAT I have in my life but WHO I have in my life that counts.” – Unknown

24. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” – Henry David Thoreau

25. “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” – Jim Rohn (more…)

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