Comparing Bible and Berkshire

Bible - They shall eat, and not have enough: they shall commit whoredom, and shall not increase: because they have left off to take heed to the Lord. Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart. Hosea 4:10-11

1. Whoredom (sexual issues)
2. Wine (feel good solutions)

Berkshire - “Avoid crazy at all costs. Crazy is way more common than you think. It’s easy to slip into crazy. Just avoid it, avoid it, avoid it.” - Charlie Munger

What exactly constituted “crazy,” in Munger’s estimation? “My partner Charlie says there is only three ways a smart person can go broke: liquor, ladies and leverage,” - Warren Buffett

1. Liquor
2. Ladies
3. Leverage (debt)

Almost a parallel here! These ethical standards are important issues here in 2024!

 

Berkshire Hathaway paths to success and old age.... Most important avoiding the following six Losing habits…

1. Liquor - Avoid body destroying alcohol
2. Ladies - Avoid destructive relationships along with Charlie Munger
3. Leverage - Avoid debt
4. Lunacy - Avoid crazy at all costs, in which is more common than you think. It’s easy to slip into crazy. Just avoid it!
5. Il-Literacy - “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” - Charlie Munger
6. Laziness – Look out for those who are trying to fool you or lie to you or aren’t reliable in meeting their commitments, A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments, According to “Poor Charlie’s Almanack,” which collected so-called Mungerisms. “You need to keep raw, irrational emotion under control. You need patience and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy.” In Munger’s view, to be a great investor, you’d be better off reading 100 biographies than 100 books about how to invest. The key is to immerse yourself in ideas across disciplines to create your latticework of mental models. He admonished people to “Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.”

Munger and Buffett are famous for living well below their means, with both having lived in the same houses for decades rather than upgrading. By leverage, Buffett was referring to the strategy of borrowing money to invest in stocks or buy another business. Munger’s second point about learning is one he returned to over and over in his career. He believed constant, lifelong learning was the key to success. “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines,” Munger said in a 2007 commencement address at the University of Southern California Law School. “They go to bed every night a little wiser than when they got up, and boy does that help — particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

 

My favorite so-called Mungerisms...

1. “I think life is a whole series of opportunity costs. You know, you got to marry the best person who is convenient to find who will have you. Investment is much the same sort of a process.” — 1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

2. "Another thing, of course, is life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn’t matter. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea." — 2007 USC Law School Commencement Address

3. “You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. All these simple rules work so well to make your life better.” — 2019 CNBC interview

4. “I think that a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.” — 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

5. “Live within your income and save so that you can invest. Learn what you need to learn.” — Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger

6. “I find it much easier to find four or five investments where I have a pretty reasonable chance of being right that they're way above average. I think it's much easier to find five than it is to find 100. I think the people who argue for all this diversification — by the way, I call it ‘deworsification’ — which I copied from somebody — and I'm way more comfortable owning two or three stocks which I think I know something about and where I think I have an advantage.”

7. "I think that the modern investor, to get ahead, almost has to get in a few stocks that are way above average. They try and have a few Apples and Googles or so on, just to keep up, because they know that a significant percentage of all the gains that come to all the common stockholders combined is going to come from a few of these supercompetitors."

8. “I have a friend who’s a fisherman. He says, ‘I have a simple rule for success in fishing. Fish where the fish are.’ You want to fish where the bargains are. That simple. If the fishing is really lousy where you are you should probably look for another place to fish.”— 2020 Daily Journal Annual Meeting

9. “The world is full of foolish gamblers and they will not do as well as the patient investors.” — 2018 Weekly in Stocks

10. "I am personally skeptical of some of the hype that has gone into artificial intelligence. I think old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well." — 2023 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

11. “We’ve had enough good sense when something is working very well to keep doing it. I’d say we’re demonstrating what might be called the fundamental algorithm of life — repeat what works. I spent a lifetime trying to avoid my own mental biases. A.) I rub my own nose into my own mistakes. B.) I try and keep it simple and fundamental as much as I can. And, I like the engineering concept of a margin of safety. I’m a very blocking and tackling kind of thinker. I just try to avoid being stupid. I have a way of handling a lot of problems — I put them in what I call my ‘too hard pile,’ and just leave them there. I’m not trying to succeed in my ‘too hard pile.’” — CalTech Distinguished Alumni Award interview

12. “You’ll do better if you have passion for something in which you have aptitude. If Warren Buffett had gone into ballet, no one would have heard of him.” – 2008 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.

13. "If you don’t see the world the way it is, it’s like judging something through a distorted lens."

14. "All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there. And a related thought: Early on, write your desired obituary — and then behave accordingly.

15. "You can learn a lot from dead people. Read of the deceased you admire and detest."

16. "Warren and I don’t focus on the froth of the market. We seek out good long-term investments and stubbornly hold them for a long time."

17. "There is no such thing as a 100% sure thing when investing. Thus, the use of leverage is dangerous. A string of wonderful numbers times zero will always equal zero. Don’t count on getting rich twice."

18. "You don’t, however, need to own a lot of things in order to get rich."

19. "You have to keep learning if you want to become a great investor. When the world changes, you must change."

20. "Warren and I hated railroad stocks for decades, but the world changed and finally the country had four huge railroads of vital importance to the American economy. We were slow to recognize change, but better late than never.

 

I post these things as I see so much crazy these days. When my dad was alive I tried to keep him in church. It was an incredible thing to me to see how bad off people can be by not taking care of themselves and finding wholesome things to get involved in life. Alcohol and adultery especially... Which may top the list of unhealthy things to get involved in our time. I go to a Wednesday morning bible study in which the leader will spend months in Florida and reside here in Virginia as well. Just looking at the guy and I suspect he spends too much time in alcohol and not enough time doing physically productive things.

 

This was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. - Ezekiel 16:49-50

There are temporary feel goods that go along with bad lifestyle habits. I worry that we will revisit these in the last days. And that they will become the norm of the times. And that they will look down on us for not partaking in the excess as they do-

For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries: Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you: - 1 Peter 4:3-4

And that it is also important for us to get out in vote for responsible candidates here in 2024.

 

Alice Cooper for President. A Sick Man for a Sick Nation... Hey! At least he's honest and not aiming to trash America under false pretense!