A financial giant died this week. Charlie Munger, business partner of Warren Buffett, has died at 99. And he still hadn’t retired: He and Buffett spoke virtually every day on the phone about Berkshire Hathaway, the $783 billion, 383,000-employee conglomerate they had run together for nearly half a century.
When I started to become interested in the world of investment, I did like many people and I quickly fell into the Munger pot. Biographies, speeches, interviews, collections of quotes: I tried to absorb his lessons and teachings on a host of subjects.
Charlie Munger had “the best 30-second mind” in the world, according to Warren Buffett.
“ [Munger] goes from A to Z in one go. He sees the essence of everything before you even finish your sentence,” he once said.
In his preface to Damn Right!the Munger biography by Janet Lowe that returned to the top of the sales charts this week, Buffett notes that his friend did nothing to acquire these skills: he was born with them.
“However, it was the way he chose to use them that made me think so highly of him,” Buffett writes.
Throughout his life, Munger strove to sharpen his mind, particularly through reading. Among his heroes were the Stoics, including Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, as well as Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.
His family, he said, described it as “a book with two legs sticking out from under it.”
Munger often spoke of refusing to feel sorry for oneself. In the mouth of a billionaire who seemed to have succeeded in everything, these words might seem strange.
Marcus Aurelius already wrote: “If an external element makes you suffer, your pain is not caused by this element as such, but by the judgment you have of it, and you have the power to cancel this at any time. moment. »
This quote could define Charlie Munger’s fight. This is because the businessman has not always been rich. Or admired. And his life was tragic, as I relate in the conclusion of my book Of zero to millionaire.
In 1953, then a 29-year-old lawyer in Los Angeles, Charlie Munger divorced. The couple had three young children and Munger had a small salary.
He lost practically everything in his separation, including his house. The father then stayed in a room in a university residence. His car was in such bad shape that even his children pointed it out to him.
A year later, in 1954, his son Teddy, aged 8, was diagnosed with leukemia, blood cancer, an incurable disease at that time. Teddy soon had to be transferred to a hospital in Pasadena, California, to a children’s hospice unit, “one of the saddest places on earth,” Munger once said.
Every day, he and his ex-wife went to the hospital to visit their bedridden son who was getting weaker and weaker. A family friend later recalled that Munger “held his son in his arms, then went walking through the streets of Pasadena, crying.”
Teddy Munger died the following year, at the age of 9.
At 31, Charlie Munger was divorced, had just buried his young son, was penniless and faced a large hospital bill.
In an essay on Munger’s life, author Safal Niveshak writes: “It would have been tempting for him to abandon everything and turn to vices (alcohol, drugs) as so many people did at the time.” But Charlie didn’t give up. »
A few years later, Munger met Warren Buffett at a dinner. The two men immediately knew they were meant to work together. Their combination would create one of the largest industrial and financial conglomerates in the world. Charlie also remarried and had four children with his new wife.
The difficulties have not stopped. In his fifties, Munger suffered a serious infection in his left eye after cataract surgery went wrong, an extremely painful and difficult event to accept for a man who considered reading his favorite activity, the duty of all someone who wants to learn and improve. Then both of his eyes became infected and doctors thought he would go blind.
“Well, I think it’s time I learned Braille,” Munger replied.
He ultimately retained vision in his right eye. But his left eye hurt so much that it had to be replaced with a glass eye.
In a speech to graduating law students at the University of Southern California (USC) in 2007, Munger said you should never feel sorry for yourself.
“Envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous ways of thinking. Every time you find yourself drifting into self-pity – and I don’t care what the cause is; your child could die of cancer – remember, it won’t make things better. This is a ridiculous way to behave. Life has terrible, horrible, unfair misfortunes… Some people recover and others don’t… Every misfortune in life is an opportunity to learn. Your duty is not to feel sorry for yourself and to use this bad luck constructively. »
What is moving in his speech is that Charlie does not mention that his own son died of cancer. The students listening to him had no idea.
The important thing, he said, is to get back up. Always. No life is perfect.
“I don’t like the feeling of being a victim,” Munger once said. I am not a victim. I’m a survivor. »