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

  
  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

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Be Imperfect

  
  Education
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As a trader – or an investor – you will not be right all of the time. If you can accept your imperfection, and work within it, you will be much more successful:

If you have a perfectionist mentality when trading, you are setting yourself up for failure, because it is a “given” that you will experience losses along the way. You must begin to think of trading as a game of probability. Your losses ( that you hope will return to breakeven) will kill you. If you cannot take a loss when it is small ( because of the need to be perfect), then you will watch that small loss grow into a larger loss and so on into a vicious cycle of more and more pain for the perfectionist. Trading on hope does not work. The markets can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent.

The object should be excellence in trading, not perfection. Moreover, it is essential to strive for excellence over a sustained period, as opposed to judging that each trade must be excellent. This is a marathon…not a sprint.

The greatest traders know how to take cut losses and let winning positions run. Perfectionists often do exactly the opposite. They get in at the wrong time, stay in too long and then get out the wrong time. Perfectionists are always striving and never arriving. The market will find the flaw in a perfectionistic trader and exploit it day after day.

12 Reflections on Life and Markets

  
  Education
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I’ve never seen a trader succeed whose explicit or implicit goal was to not lose. The trader who trades to not lose is like the person who lives to avoid death: both become spiritual hypochondriacs.

No union was ever destroyed by a failure of romance. It is the loss of respect, not love, which ends a relationship.

Love, once present, never dies. It must be killed.

Sometimes we select markets–and trading styles–much as we choose romantic partners: by their ability to validate our deepest-held images of ourselves. Our choices generally succeed, for better or for worse.

Many a trader fears boredom more than loss, thereby experiencing the two in sequence.

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Dr.Elizabeth Lombardo, Better Than Perfect-Book REVIEW

  
  Education
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BETTER THAN PERFECTPerfectionism as it is usually understood can be a terrible curse, especially for a trader. It leads a person to act out of fear rather than passion—and sometimes not to act at all (why bother? I’ll botch it anyway). The perfectionist has both an “incessant drive to control the future” and “the unsatisfying feeling that, no matter how hard [he tries, he] will always come up short.” (p. 7)

In Better Than Perfect: 7 Strategies to Crush Your Inner Critic and Create a Life You Love (Seal Press, forthcoming September 23) Elizabeth Lombardo, a clinical psychologist and author of the national bestseller A Happy You, tackles the problems perfectionists create for themselves and suggests ways to overcome them.

For the most part Lombardo’s solutions involve reframing attitudes and motivations. Take the fear/passion dichotomy. “When you are fueled by fear, you focus on what you don’t want. Your goal is to do everything in your power to reduce the possibility of an undesired outcome. … Just by switching your perspective from one of fear to one of passion—working toward a desired outcome instead of avoiding an unwanted result—you can begin to feel more motivated, engaged, positive, and hopeful.” (p. 50)

Perfectionists are inclined to compare themselves to others and to judge themselves negatively. Of course, it’s not only perfectionists who do this; they are simply more intensely competitive. As Lombardo says, “Perfectionists don’t just want to ‘keep up with the Joneses,’ they want to kick the Joneses’ butts!” (p. 185) Well, that sounds more like trader talk; maybe a dose of perfectionism is actually a good thing, at least professionally. Lombardo admits that “many champion athletes, prominent scientists, and celebrities demonstrate perfectionist traits.” (p. 6)

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Be Imperfect

  
  Education
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As a trader – or an investor – you will not be right all of the time. If you can accept your imperfection, and work within it, you will be much more successful:

If you have a perfectionist mentality when trading, you are setting yourself up for failure, because it is a “given” that you will experience losses along the way. You must begin to think of trading as a game of probability. Your losses ( that you hope will return to breakeven) will kill you. If you cannot take a loss when it is small ( because of the need to be perfect), then you will watch that small loss grow into a larger loss and so on into a vicious cycle of more and more pain for the perfectionist. Trading on hope does not work. The markets can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent.

The object should be excellence in trading, not perfection. Moreover, it is essential to strive for excellence over a sustained period, as opposed to judging that each trade must be excellent. This is a marathon…not a sprint.

The greatest traders know how to take cut losses and let winning positions run. Perfectionists often do exactly the opposite. They get in at the wrong time, stay in too long and then get out the wrong time. Perfectionists are always striving and never arriving. The market will find the flaw in a perfectionistic trader and exploit it day after day.

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