The Most Eye Opening 45 Minutes Of Your Life — Charlie Munger's Legendary Speech

most of my schooling was in the great depression but that means i'm one of the very few people that's still alive who deeply remembers the great depression that's been very helpful to me it was so extreme that people like you have just no idea what the hell it was like and it was really there was just nobody had any money the rich people didn't have any money people would come and beg for a meal at the door and we had a hobo jungle not very far from my grandfather's house and i was safer in that

hobo jungle in the depths of the 30s when people were starving practically that i am walking around my own neighborhood now in los angeles at night the world has changed on that you'd think the crime would be less but crime was pretty low in those days so anyway so i had a very unusual bunch of experience to be to go through civilization in various phases including the greatest recession well i say it's one of the greatest recessions in 600 years in the english-speaking world it was really something and it was very interesting to watch and

also to watch it fixed it was fixed by the accidental keynesianism of world war ii very interesting and hitler had fixed the great depression in in germany by the deliberate keynesianism but he wasn't doing it to stimulate the economy he wanted to get even with all the people he hated but he borrowed all this money and created all these armaments and hitler's germany by 1939 was the strongest economic car in europe and nobody else was close and you wouldn't understand that as well as i do if you hadn't lived through it you just didn't see

the place gaining traction more and more and more and more and pretty soon it was fixed and in those days there were all kinds of people most of my family they believed in hard money based on gold and not much welfare and so on and so on so that i was raised among fairly backward people by modern standards but they were backward in kind of a self-reliant way that i think was helpful i've never regretted that i wasn't raised in a more liberal establishment i had a liberal aunt she was my mother's cousin but she

i was and she was the first second lady dean at the university of chicago and she done her thesis on the conditions in the coal mines and of course she was a screaming leftist i would be a streaming leftist if i observed the way the coal miners of yesteryear were treated you couldn't be a human being with any decency in you without feeling that it was deeply improper to have the misery that great and have it manipulated for the benefit of the mind owners and so forth but she sent me all these leveling books one

every christmas and i always thought she was a little nuts which shows that if sometimes a very vivid extreme ex you know evidence misleads you on the deeper reality you've got to be a guard on that against that all your life in fact the whole trick in life is to get so that your own brain doesn't mislead you and i have found that just a lifelong fun game and i can't remember a time i wasn't doing it [Music] i was not a prodigy or anything like that but i was a prodigy in having adult interests

i was interested in what worked and what didn't and why and i could see that very imminent people that i loved and revered were nuts in some ways and i would decide well i certainly like dr davis but he's a little nutty in one way and i'm not going to be that like that and so it's very judgmental and i think that helped me and also helped me that i kept changing my judgments as i learned more and more facts came in and that created lifelong habits that were very very useful another thing that i

think really helped me is particularly on my father's side of the family my eternal grandfather was the only federal judge in lincoln nebraska capital city of nebraska and he'd been there forever and he stayed there forever after that i think when he left he was the longest-serving federal judge in the country and he was a brilliant man and he'd risen from nothing he was a child of two impoverished school teachers and when he was raised in the little town of nebraska they'd give him a nickel to go buy the meat and he'd go to the

butcher shop and he would buy the parts of the animal nobody else would eat and that's what two schoolteachers lived on in those days and the very indignity of it bothered him so much that he he just determined to get out of poverty and and never go back and he did he got ahead like abe lincoln educated himself in lawyer's offices and so on he had to leave college because he couldn't pay the tuition anymore and but he educated himself and since he was utterly brilliant it wasn't all that hard and he had an attitude

it was pretty damned extreme and i would say his attitude was that you have a moral duty to make yourself as unignorant and as unstupid as you possibly can and that it was your pretty much your highest moral duty maybe taking care of your family came first but but in the ranks of moral obligations he was conventionally religious so it may have been a religious duty to him but he he really believed that that rationality was a moral duty and he worked at it and he scorned people who'd who didn't do it on the other

hand as a judge he started with the idea that why would anybody rob a train or whatever federal crime in those days and he was pretty hard on people who did it and i noticed as he got to older and older and older he was willing to call a man a good man on easier terms than he started out with and i think that was a correct a correct development in my by the way when he relaxed a little he was still pretty tough but he he did relax a little which i thought was appropriate

and but it was but influenced by such people and when the 30s came one son-in-law was a musician of course he couldn't make a living so my grandfather didn't have that much money sent him to pharmacy school carefully picking a profession that couldn't fail and found him a bankrupt pharmacy to buy and loan him the money and my uncle was soon prosperous and remain prosperous the rest of his life my other uncle had a bank in stroudsburg nebraska but there were 968 people in strasburg and there were two national banks and the capitalization of my

uncle's bank was 25 000 and of course he was a lovely man but he was an optimist and a banker should not be an optimist and when they closed the banks in 1933 the banking examiners came in and they said you can't reopen and it was the only business he had well judge monger had always saved his money and he had a lot of good first mortgages on homes occupied by teetotaling german butchers and people he'd carefully pitched and of course he never had a default houses were in the right neighborhood the people were sober

and hardworking and so what my grandfather did is take a third of his good mortgages which is all he had put him into the bank and took all the lousy assets out of the bank so he saved two out of three of his children and i thought it was a pretty good thing to do and very shrewd the way he did it and he actually got most of his money back 10 or 15 years later out of the lossy assets of the bank when world war ii and that was a good lesson on the other

side my grandfather on the other side his main business had gone broke in 1922 with all the other wholesale dry goods houses and what he did his son-in-law one of them went broke and he cut his house in half and moved that family in and the other family the guy was an honors graduate of the harvard school of architecture and he was very prosperous in the 20s in omaha and had a wonderful life and the 30s came the total building permits in omaha would sometimes be 25 000 a month and that was for furnace repairs

or something there was just no work none zero so he moved to california and he lived for several years and he got finally he got the county of los angeles to hire this great harvard architect and his he got 108.08 a month after deductions and they had him do drafting work but they classified him as a laundromat to save money and he could actually rent a house for 25 and feed himself and drive an old car he could live on 109 a month amazing how poor everybody was and what happened to that grandfather is along

came the fha and they had a competitive civil service examination and he was a very brilliant man of course he was first in the exam and i made him the chief architect for the fha in los angeles where he spent the rest of his life but i watched all this family coping with all this difficulty and i'll say this it sounds awful but they weren't all that unhappy you can cope pretty well because you get used to it that's a nice thing about the human condition and when you get to be my age you've got

a lot of horrible things to get used to it's just one new indignity all the time a friend of mine says a good day when you're old is when you wake up in the morning and nothing new hurts so anyway that's my experience in omaha but that background of these all these people were educated and civilized and generous and decent and a lot of them had good senses of humor and it was a pretty damn good place to grow up in and my memory is of being surrounded by a lot of very fine people and

i think the whole thing was privileged i look at my background is absolutely privileged i'm proud of being an omaha boy i sometimes use the old saying they got the boy out of omaha but they never got them all out of the boy and and so that all those old-fashioned values family comes first be in a position so you can help others when troubles come prudent sensible moral duty to be reasonable more important than anything else more important than being rich more important than being important an absolute moral duty because none of my intelligent relatives

suffered terribly because they didn't advance higher right yeah i mean one of the things i'm fascinated by is um i mean this was in the 20s and 30s and the level of detail that you recall about their experiences and how that's shaping your experiences now i'm trying to give people a flavor of something that nobody else can remember yeah i mean you're you're a student of the people that you're experiencing so so you grow up in omaha nebraska you find yourself in ann arbor michigan how does that happen very simple i wanted to go to

stanford and my father said to me charlie i was the only son two two sisters he says i've got two daughters to educate right after you i don't have unlimited money he says i will send you to stanford if it really means a great deal to you but i'd rather you pick a university in the midwest much better than mine which was the university of nebraska and that was obviously going to be michigan what was i going to say well screw you send me to stanford oh i didn't say that i went to michigan i

have never regretted that at all when i was young i could get an a in any mathematics course without doing any work at all and so i always took math because it meant that i could literally i never did any problem sets i just did the math and i should not get credit to some budding mathematician i was choosing what for me was the easiest way to think about what i wanted to instead of what somebody else wanted me to do well come to find out it ended up being a subject that has i think

paid some dividends hugely yeah but but but this will interest you in this world where people have all these algorithms and computer science and fancy math and so forth neither warren or eyes ever have ever used any fancy math and business and needed ben graham who taught warren everything i've ever done in business could be done with the simplest algebra and geometry and addition mobilization and so forth i never used calculus for any practical work in my whole damn life and i was there and i was a perfect whiz at it when they taught it

to me and by the way since i never touched calculus not one after i was 19 years old i've lost it it's the the symbols would mystify me and but i think you'll find that if you really know the basic stuff it's enormously useful and only a very few people are ever going to need any calculus so you study math at michigan then the war comes calling yeah you move to california and you study meteorology well that was because i was too dumb to do what i should have done with with my background i should

have gone to the naval rotc because i hated infantry rotc which i'd done four years of in high school rising to be second lieutenant which is a very low rank and of course i was about five feet two i got my growth late so i was i didn't it was not your ideal of a manly soldier in high school so when you went to harvard law why why why law because well my grandfather and father had been lawyers and i knew i didn't want to do everything else it's very simple i don't want to be

a doctor i didn't want all the blood and misery and so forth and the repetitive work i knew i didn't want to go to the bottom of a big organization and crawl my way up i'm a natural contrarian that was not going to work for me and i found that people could tell me when i thought they were idiots and that is not a way to rise in a big organization and and so i couldn't do that and so now i'm left with law i went and i admired my father and grandfather in a good

life for them so i naturally drifted into it i think people are still going to law school for that reason it's the least bad of options considering their interests and ability i guess now people go to business school some of them who in my day would go see yeah many of the people in this room i think are going to go to business schools the least bad to their options and all i can say is that that's the way it worked for me and it'll probably work out for you and it worked out okay it

worked out okay so so i had to leave the profession well it was a dumb profession for me so so that's actually what i want to ask so you move to california you actually start a law firm and then practice law for some period of time i had no alternative and then you actually had an army of children almost immediately i painted myself in quite a corner yeah so zero choice is pretty powerful yeah for sure yes of course so so you practice law and then you leave law in the firm that you helped found

and move over to investments well but that sounds miraculous in fact it was rather interesting i probably got paid about 350 000 in my first 13 years of law practice total and i had an army of children and no capital to start with and when i chose this alternative career i had over 300 000 in liquid instruments and that was 10 years of living expenses so i was not a courageous venture some admirable man i was a cautious little squirrel saving up more nuts than i really needed and not going very deep into my pile

of nuts and so that was it wasn't that courageous and i kept one foot in the law firm while i tried my capitalist career but as soon as the capitalist career succeeded i intended to lift that second foot because i recognized that the potential of law practice as i saw it then i didn't anticipate the boom that came to the big berms i just saw it as being more difficult i wanted more independence i was going to have as a lawyer i hated sending other people invoices and needing money from richer people i thought it

was undignified i wanted my own money not because i loved ease or social prison i wanted the independence well and and when you so you founded wheeler monger and company so that was the investment firm yes and for and i went and i created five real estate projects i did both side by side for a few years and uh in a very few years i had three or four million dollars and for a number of years you outperformed the market 2x 3x and so why did you then leave wheeler monger in company and then move

to now what you're doing well i had three or four million dollars which was a lot of money then and i also knew how to handle that three or four million dollars very well by that time and so i i knew i didn't need to get fees and override some other investors and i found that when you got into things like the 74 75 crunch which is the worst since the 30s i didn't suffer i knew everything was going to work out but the quoted prices of these things really went down to ridiculous levels and

some of my investors i knew were suffering you know i needed the money and of course i have enough of a fiduciary gene that that pained me greatly and so i still alright it's just it's like the my grandfather once they asked you how he felt when my aunt divorced my uncle and he said i feel just the way i did when they lanced my carbuncle and that's the way uh i had a carbuncle my fiduciary chain was giving me pain i just lived on my own money no fees no overrides no salaries it seemed

more manly to do when i knew it would work and so at what point did you meet warren and 1959 and so where did berkshire hathaway come from in terms of this partnership that you all have now had for decades well warren had been taught by ben graham to buy things for less than they were worth no matter how lousy the business was you can't imagine a more lousy business than new england textile mills because textile is a congealed electricity and the electricity rates in new england were about 60 percent higher than tva rates so

it was absolute inevitable certain liquidation a warrant should have known better than to buy into a totally doomed enterprise but it was so damn cheap and compared to a big discount from liquidating value so he bought her all the business but the business was going to die so the only way to go forward from there was to bring enough money out of this declining textile business to have more money than he paid to get in and use it to buy something else that's a very indirect way to proceed and i would not recommend it to

any of you just because we did some dumb thing that worked you don't have to repeat our path and of course we eventually learned not to buy these cigar butts when they're cheap and do these painful liquidations and instead buy better businesses that's the main secret of berkshire the reason that berkshire has been successful as a big conglomerate more successful than any other big conglomerate so far as i know any other big conglomerate in the world the reason it's been successful is we try and buy things that aren't going to require much managerial talent at

headquarters everybody else thinks they've got a lot of managerial talented headquarters and that's a lot of hubris if the business is lousy enough it gets a wonderful manager the business has a lousy reputation and the manager has a good reputation it's the reputation of the business that's going to remain intact you can't fix these really lousy businesses you can ring the money out whatever comes in liquidation and do something else with it but most lousy businesses can't be fixed but at the time warren was that's what he was doing and so yes how did you

convince him i helped him he bought a windmill company in a little town in nebraska and warren didn't know anything about running a windmill company he bought it because it was cheap he said what do you do why can't you fix my windmill company who can you get to help me i said i've got just the man for you and so one of my old colleagues from a transformer business who was an accountant i said he will fix your windmill company and warren was desperate he didn't he just hired him on the spot and harry

walked in the first day this little town this big collection of windmills and so forth and the whistle blew and the whole point stopped for 15 minutes what the hell is this hold this whistle and stop for 15 minutes mary said that'll be the last time and he just approached everything that way and of course another thing he did is he he cut away all the fat that he didn't need and then he found there were certain parts where we were the sole supply and he raised all the price of those parts you can see

what a business genius we are so how did you convince warren to stop buying the bad apples and start buying the good apples i think warren warren he gave me credit for that he was going to learn it anyway he just made so much money and this other stuff and he'd been taught by ben graham it was hard for him to quit when he was just coining money but he saw the point and well you couldn't scale that business and it was kind of scrunchy and unpleasant and you're firing people who in the hell wants

to do that so we just run the money out bought better businesses and we've been doing it ever since coming to business not as business school graduates but as people who would owned portfolios of securities we thought like capitalists because we were always in a shelter mindset a lot of people running the businesses think like carreras and believe me you got to think like a career is to some extent if you're in a career but it also helps to look at the business strategy problems as though you're an owner and so my advice to you

is you don't want to be never get to be a career so much you don't see it from the owner's point of view that's what general motors did they had a bunch of careerists and an owner would have seen immediately that the situation was hopeless and they just romped through it with a lot of denial and stupidity and pomposity and of course they went bankrupt the mightiest company in the world went bankrupt and none of those hotshot executives thought like an owner they would have seen that it was hopeless charlie one of the things i've

always been fascinated about it was hopeless the way they were well with berkshire in the way that you all manage both headquarters and the businesses that you own you are putting talent in place who think like shareholders not careerists so how do you when you're buying a business how do you or or bringing talent into an existing business how do you evaluate talent to see are they going to think more like a shareholder as a private equity frequently by a business where the founder is going to leave then they go on our talent to run

it that is a tough way to make a bug and i don't like it we generally buy with the talent in place now maybe some guy in the number two place and we put him in the number one plate but we very seldom i can hardly i can't think of any place where we bought something and put somebody in after hairy bottle and no we don't do that and and it's amazing how long we have some of those people stay born always says we can't we can't teach the new dogs the old tricks [Music] what's

the implication of not being able to teach the old dogs new tricks or new tricks to old dogs when if we look at what's happening in business today what we see is exactly we can't teach the old tricks to the young dogs that's that's what we found and and we keep the old dog in place but that's not that's not the norm right i mean if we look around it's a norm in life it may not be our practices may not be the norm but normally it's very hard to get the you got a wise

old dog getting a young dog that can match him that's hard by definition he's survived a big culling process sure i mean he's he's he's unique and he's got a record to prove it and by the way everybody thinks you can judge people by an interview and of course you know who you like you know you don't like but everybody overestimates how much you can tell in prediction by meeting somebody we all like to think that we have that capacity but it's a vastly stupid type of overconfidence the paper record has about three times the

predictive value of your impression in an interview and of course we're buying great paper records it's so simple but it's it's fascinating to me if we look around business generally the movement of people across firms and there's always new dogs and you've taken a contrarian position to that and managed berkshire differently well it isn't like we're of course we're still hiring young adults in the end of these businesses but it's amazing how much of the record of berkshire has come from the old dogs who are in the business when we buy them you can't believe

how good those people have been there's one huge exception in the new dog department i almost despise the business of executive search because i find that they really want to sell you the best that's available even if it's no damn good and i don't like that but the best single expense that berkshire ever had is we paid an executive recruiting firm to find assaji chain to come into our little tiny insurance operation he'd have any experience in insurance at all he was an honors graduate of the maine technical institute of india he's a very smart

man but he he came in and created our whole reunion it's the only big business we created from scratch and aji did the whole damn thing of course he talked with warren every night and so it was like father and son remember this is a very confucian company but that was unbelievable so we we hired an executive recruiter he brings us an indian has no experience at all insurance he talks with an old man every night and it's now by far the biggest reinsurance business in the world and it's been a gold mine there's at

least 60 billion dollars in berkshire of net worth that ajit has created that we would not have created without him wow and the value is way more than 60 billion i mean there's i mean there's that much an extra just liquid net worth but the value of the business is way more than 60 billion so charlie i'm going to turn to a few questions from the audience as we start to wrap up probably half my questions here are about bitcoin and cryptocurrency well i can answer those very quickly i think it's perfectly asimine to even

pause to think about them you know it's one thing to think that gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily so it has the advantage of rarity believe me man is capable of somehow creating more bitcoin [Music] they tell you they're not going to do it but they mean they're not going to do it unless they want to that's what they mean when they say they're not going to do it and if they hear their rules and they can't do it don't believe

them when there's enough incentive bad things will happen it's bad people crazy bubble bad idea luring people into the concept of easy wealth without much insider work that's the last thing on earth you should think about if it worked it would be bad for you to try and do it again it's totally insane and by the way i've just laid out a wonderful life lesson for you give a whole lot of things a wide berth they don't exist you know crooks crazies egomaniacs people full of resentment people full of self-pity people who feel like victims

there's a whole lot of things that aren't going to work for you figure out what they are and avoid them like the plague and one of them is bitcoin and the worst thing would happen if you won because then you do it again it's just it's total insanity and it's so easy to simplify life from just all these things are beneath you now i don't even want to know people are promoting bitcoin i don't want to know my address so charlie i'm not my kind of people charlie what i hear you saying is you're not

going to be investing in bitcoin is that that's fair i think you're fair so so let me move to a similarly uh maybe controversial topic i don't i you know i don't know if you read the news recently but there's a lot of tax policy conversation uh going on both here in california and and nationally as well what's your thought on where this ends up uh in terms of the tax policy i think we will get a tax bill i think they will squeak it through and they'll make whatever adjustments they have to to get

the last few votes i don't think it's a bit crazy to give this extra two thousand a year to all those people who make seventy thousand dollars a year and have a lot of children [Music] that strikes me as a it's good politics and probably good policy i also do not think it is crazy to reduce the corporate income tax on the c corporation and if you look at the world a lot of the places that have worked best including singapore and so forth have that policy and may even have good macroeconomic consequences and a

lot of the people who are screaming about it and they're so sure it won't work they may not be right it may actually work pretty well it causes the capital values of the companies to come up and there's a wealth effect from the increased market value of all the companies everybody recognizes there's an effect but people some people say it's small and some people say it's going to be large and i'll tell you what they all have in common none of them know it is not totally inconceivable that it will work pretty well and with

so much of the world doing well with similar tax policy and of course the democrats go berserk on this subject and i think they're wrong it may actually help them i'm not sure it'll work it may not but it's not totally crazy well it reminds me of a piece of advice that uh you've offered and and given to me which is you know people often have a point of view and the danger in uh in having that point of view is you start to assume with certainty that you're right absolutely totally crazy and i think

what your point of view is is you need to have a point of view here's a very important subject i've been thinking about all my life you answer my opinion yes i don't really know how well it's going to work i don't think anybody else does either i think it'll work to some extent but how much i don't know is it unfair well the corporations are by and large owned by a bunch of charitable endowments and buy a bunch of pension plans and the whole world is going into a world where they're trying to have

the business interests of the company support their huge pension obligations get bigger all the time china is trying to do exactly what the republicans are china wants to have the main businesses in china owned more by the pension plans and the stocks to do well i don't think china's crazy to have that i don't think republicans are crazy either it could work pretty well and and it's not just some evil thing that people are cooking up it's a disagreement between people and both sides who have violent hatreds and contempt for the other side they're wrong

it's a disagreement on policy that ought to be civilized when i see congress on my television set and the degree of hatred they have utter contempt i mean really serious way more than as usual it's evil to hate that much it's a mistake to hate that much that much hatred will turn it's always been true as anger comes in reason leaves it's a truism so do you want to adopt a political point of view or you're angry all the time if you do welcome to the house of misery and pretty low worldly achievement to boot

so if that's what you want i i you just if i found out how to do it behave like those people you see on television well the other thing is both parties by the way yeah the other thing that's true going back to one of the earlier comments is the difference difference between a careerist mindset and a service or shareholder mindset where in politics we have the emergence of a careerist mindset that is shaping how people behave because they're trying to survive only that they have a group think just as the moonies go crazy because

they hang around together so do our politicians yeah and do you want to go crazy is that what your ambition in life you start with some advantage just make yourself a violently believing politician on either side you'll turn your brain into cabbage you only got one brain why would you want to turn it into cabbage so charlie i've got a question here what's the uh new amazing technology that you're most excited about well i tend to get not not to get very excited about i think that technology changes the world and that reminds me of

the thing if i asked you what was the biggest the worst single mistake in the work of adam smith i know i'd get a i don't see everybody big eyes lighting up biggest mistake in the work of adam smith he was totally right about markets and so on and the advantages of trade division of labor and so forth what he missed was how much the steady advance of technology would advance wealth and standards of living he in the 1700s was living not too much differently than the way they lived in the roman empire and he

just missed it but and there in fact had been huge improvements in technology but he just missed it he wasn't very technically minded and it was really stupid and now i'll ask you a harder question what was the worst mistake david ricardo made i'll bet the dean can't answer this question i'm not going to ask you to try i'll tell you the answer david ricardo missed he got the first order consequences of trade perfectly right and it was not an obvious insight and it was a great achievement which is but he didn't think about the

second order consequences he wasn't mathematical enough to see and he wasn't mathematical to think what would happen when one country had way higher living standards than another and he like adam smith he missed in the main issue in a place like the united states if you have an advanced nation and some other nation which is numerous but the people of anything are better on average than yours in terms of their inequality which i think is roughly true of china and they're in poverty they're living in caves and they're caught in a malthusian trap and you've

got an advanced economy and you suddenly go into free trade what is going to happen is ricardo proved it both sides are going to live better right but the people here that are assimilating all the great economies of the world in china they're going to go way faster so you go up 2 a year and they go up 12. and pretty soon they're the dominant nation in the world and you aren't well are you really better off well the answer is no and ricardo never figure out any of that stuff and so i'm telling you

that so that you can fix your inadequate knowledge of ricardo and and but one of the interesting problems of that is you can't understand ricardo properly and thinking about the united states visa be free trade with china without thinking about the tragedy of the commons because if we had the only nation in the world except for china we could say we won't trade with them we'll just leave them in their damned agricultural poverty and we'll just you know and we could probably have done that but the whole rest of the world will trade with they're

going to rise anyway so we don't have any power to to to hold back the rise of china by not trading with them so we had to do what we did and once you do that now they're going to be a greater power than we are and the two of us are going to be big enough so we can accomplish pretty gently anything we both want to do so we have to be friendly with china [Music] so you can imagine how i like donald trump complaining about the chinese it's really stupid it's a compulsory friendship

you'd be out of your mind to do anything else why wouldn't you want to have an intimate friendly relationship with the biggest other power in the whole damn world particularly when they got a bunch of atom bombs it's just nutty we have no alternative but to do this and when that happens you're going to get a certain amount of misery at the people who are competing with the chinese as they rise from poverty with trade and so forth that was inevitable it's not the fault of a bunch of evil republicans who don't love the poor

that is just total balderdash it just happened and we didn't have all these choices so charlie in wrapping up um we've got roughly 250 300 people in the room tonight and many of them looking at their futures their careers with many decades ahead of them well i wish i had many decades ago i'd trade i'd trade some large numbers if i could just buy some life experience as you look back on your life experience what's the most important piece of advice that you would offer everyone in the room tonight as they look forward into their

futures well there are a few obvious ones they're all ancient ben franklin here marriage is like the most important decision you have not your business career and it'll do more for you good or bad than anything else and ben franklin had the best advice ever given on marriage he said keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shut thereafter it's amazing how if you just get up every morning and keep plugging and have some discipline and keep learning and and it's amazing how it works out okay i don't think it's wise to have an

ambition to be president of the united states or a billionaire or something like that because the odds are too much against you much better to aim low i did not intend to get rich i wanted to get independent i just overshot and and by the way while you're clapping some of the overshooting was accidental there's a big you can be very deserving and very intelligent very disciplined but there's also a factor of luck that comes into this thing and the people get the good the outcomes that seem extraordinary the people who have discipline and intelligence

and good virtue plus a hell of a lot of luck why wouldn't the world work like that so you shouldn't give credit for the unusual a lot of the people a friend of mine said about a colleague of his and his fraternity he says old george was a duck sitting on a pond and they raised the level of a pond there are a lot of people that just lock into the right place and rise and then and there are a lot of very eminent people who have many advantages and they've got one little flaw or

one bit of bad luck and they they're mired in misery all their lives but that makes it interesting to have all this variation