“I’m not interested in anything that’s not sustainable. Friendships, investing, careers, podcasts, reading habits, exercise habits. If I can’t keep it going, I’m not interested in it.“

— Morgan Housel

Quotes from the Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 64:

• Let him hate the faults, let him love the brethren. In the matter of correction let him act prudently and not too severely, lest while he desires to scrape off the rust too much the vessel be broken; and let him always keep an eye upon his own frailty and remember that the shaken reed must not be crushed.
• ... Let him so apportion all things that there be something to which the strong may aspire and something the weak may not shrink from.

This episode includes Warren Buffett’s Snickers Story, plus the following quote from Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanac, ch 3:

• “Charlie detests placer mining. Instead, he applies his ‘big ideas from the big disciplines’ to find the large, unrecognized nuggets of gold that sometimes lie in plain sight on the ground.”
• Charlie treats financial reports and their underlying accounting with a Midwestern dose of skepticism. At best, they are merely the beginning of a proper calculation of intrinsic valuation, not the end. The list of additional factors he examines is seemingly endless and includes such things as ...
• Above all, he attempts to assess and understand competitive advantage in every respect—products, markets, trademarks, employees, distribution channels, societal trends, and so on—and the durability of that advantage. Charlie refers to a company’s competitive advantage as its moat: the virtual physical barrier it presents against incursions. Superior companies have deep moats that are continuously widened to provide enduring protection ... Munger and Buffett are laser-focused on this issue: Over their long business careers they have learned, sometimes painfully, that few businesses survive over multiple generations. Accordingly, they strive to identify and buy only those businesses with a good chance of beating these tough odds.

Mounger’s Mental Models

• Circle of Competence - The first rule of competition is that you are more likely to win if you play where you have an advantage.
• First Principles Thinking - First principles thinking is the art of breaking down complex problems into their fundamental truths.
• Second-Order Thinking
• Probabilistic Thinking
• Relativity - Relativistic Thinking
• Thermodynamics - The 1st law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form to another; 2nd law, entropy always increasing
• Inertia - The stubborn resistance of the universe to change.
• Nash Equilibrium - When two or more participants in a non-cooperative game have no incentive to deviate from their respective equilibrium strategies after considering their opponent’s choices and strategies on a rational basis.
• Mr. Market - Benjamin Graham proposed imagining the stock market as a somewhat manic and not too intelligent profile who would stop by every day to call out prices.
• Porter’s Five Forces - The five undeniable forces are 1) threat of new entrants, 2) threat of substitutes, 3) bargaining power of customers, 4) bargaining power of suppliers, and 5) competitive rivalry.
• Phillips Curve - A historical inverse relationship between rates of unemployment and corresponding rates of rises in wages that result within an economy.
• Founder’s Syndrome - The situation where leaders of companies are so emotionally invested in them that they can’t effectively delegate decisions, leading to micromanagement and stasis.
• Paradox of Choice - The effect of how eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for users.
• Cockroach Theory - There’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen.
• Critical Mass - Minimum amount of something required to sustain itself going forward.
• Inversion - Much of success comes from simply avoiding common paths to failure
• Occam’s Razor