《《A Lesson on Elementary》.pdf

Y Combinator: Elementary Worldly Wisdom 5/11/10 3:33 AM Y Combinator: Elementary Worldly Wisdom A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management Business Charles Munger, USC Business School, 1994 Im going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom—a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least in an effective way. And therefore, the talk is sort of along the lines that some behaviorist psychologists call Grandmas rule after the wisdom of Grandma when she said that you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert. The carrot part of this talk is about the general subject of worldly wisdom which is a pretty good way to start. After all, the theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. And I think to some extent, before youre going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education. So, emphasizing what I sometimes waggishly call remedial worldly wisdom, Im going to start by waltzing you through a few basic notions. What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you cant really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang em back. If the facts dont hang together on a latticework of theory, you dont have them in a usable form.