161–170 of 245 posts
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This is a good point. Santa Barbara is one of the few places on earth that has sunlight during the day, therefore people there should not have windows
Santa Barbara is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Therefore students should not have housing.
It's easier to view tragedy as something you can pick yourself up from when massive tragedy aren't mere punctuation points of the constant tragedy that is your own total immiseration.
Somewhat the height of survivorship bias. There are a many number of people that don't adopt a victim mentality, work hard, and try to get ahead and just don't. For every Charlie Munger there are tons of working poor that get up everyday, work hard for minimum wage, then go off to their second job. My entire childhood I watched both my parents, who both had 2 jobs, work themselves non-stop to try to provide for us. T…
Until you’ve actually failed hard for a very long time - over a decade - and then get a solid kick in the teeth for your efforts, and power through that shit with an optimistic attitude to succeed beyond your own expectations, it’s hard to buy into what Charlie is saying, but I can assure you it’s the absolute truth. You can’t change the hand your dealt or what life continues to deal you, but you can keep working sma…
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Yeah. "He wouldn't have hit me if I had just kept my mouth shut, I know how angry it makes him when I ask about money." I want to say this position is despicable, but that's not a very charitable reading. But I fail to see how 'making everything your own fault' is in any way a healthy mechanism for dealing with others. Other people DO make mistakes. Other people have loads that they ARE expected to carry. Other peopl…
The more charitable reading is that either you do have agency over how you got to where you are and how you can get out of it, in which case it is better to focus on believing what you do matters, or you don't, in which case it doesn't matter either way. That is why it's better to have a mindset of "I can change my situaion for the better" instead of "Life sucks I'm a victim".
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> For every Charlie Munger there are tons of working poor that get up everyday Not tons. Millions. If not hundreds of millions.
Billions. It is literally most of us. Wealth concentration is unintuitive in the extreme. But let’s debate the merits of yet another billionaire lecturing everyone about the merits of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and not being a victim. Hard work doesn’t make billionaires. Systems that accelerate privileged positions and concentrate wealth to the top do. And that’s not necessarily bad. But it’s generally ba…
> Hard work doesn’t make billionaires. Systems that accelerate privileged positions and concentrate wealth to the top do.
¿Por qué no los dos? Jeff Bezos worked pretty hard to end up where he is now.
I think the problem comes from the conflict between denying/rejecting victimhood, on the one hand, and realizing that one must get the fuck out of a very, very bad situation immediately, by any means on the other. From what I could tell it quickly becomes an inescapable cycle between "it's always my fault and I'll fix it"-- which implies leaving-- and "I've always been a victim and will always be one"-- which implies staying.
There has to be a big enough window when the person admits to themselves and others that they are unable to get out of the conundrum on their own. And, ironically, that's the the moment when they start to accept help and start living without feeling like such a victim. But that window of opportunity is at odds with "it's always your fault and you just fix it," which strongly implies you and only you fix it. That doesn't leave much/any room to realize just how much you must rely on outside help to get out.
Edit: added to the fact that apparently a lot of people also cycle between getting out of and going back to a bad situation. That makes me think it's less like flipping a bit and more like designing a high-pass filter to attenuate the victimhood frequencies.
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The quote is... "If you just take the attitude that, however bad it is in anyway, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can – the so-called ‘iron prescription’ – I think that really works." ...does not work for e.g. victims of child abuse. Child abuse is never the fault of the child.
Of course, any abuse inflicted on you is not your fault. I wouldn't take that phrase "always your fault" literally. It is about how you react to it afterwards and what you do to get back up. As he also said "you just fix it as best you can". I would focus on that phrase more.
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It's easy to make a pithy observation that he's a billionaire and then proceed to spew hate while thinking everything is a zero sum game. When Charlie was in his 30s, he was broke, his 9 year old son died, and he had a divorce. He was never a victim that blames others for their misfortunes though.
So it's his fault that all that happened to him? I am sorry that someone has died, and I regret making a comment on this particular post before realizing the actual post topic too late, but I am not too keen on living my life based upon how billionaires think. Munger, like many billionaires and as the above quote and his dorm designs showcase, liked to speak about things he didn't know anything about, and people like…
Yeah I mean, it's just a thought he expressed once. I don't think OP is saying Munger invented or owns the concept, just that it encapsulated a view that they liked. That doesn't strike me as "living life based upon how billionaires think."
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> it's probably not healthy in the long-term to pretend like it's "your fault" ... Tak[e] a clear view of the causes of your current circumstances There's always things in your control and things out of your control, but the notion of "victim" does zilch to clarify which is which. It's a pointless distraction, a snare for the mind.
Heavily disagree. It is very clear when you are a victim of child abuse that no part of your abuse was in your control, because you were a child. It's also super fucked up to say the notion of, say, a rape victim is a pointless distraction. I think a "what was in your control about you being raped" is just about the least productive way to go about the scenario of being victimized.
Somewhat the height of survivorship bias. There are a many number of people that don't adopt a victim mentality, work hard, and try to get ahead and just don't. For every Charlie Munger there are tons of working poor that get up everyday, work hard for minimum wage, then go off to their second job. My entire childhood I watched both my parents, who both had 2 jobs, work themselves non-stop to try to provide for us. T…
I think you're missing the point. The idea is more that avoiding a victim mentality typically leads to better outcomes. This isn't a surefire guarantee, but statistically, it tends to yield more favorable results. E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a…
Instead this article is just the assertions of Charlie Munger.
> E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.
What exactly is this based on? Because it _feels_ right? Because it aligns with your own personal beliefs of what makes someone successful?
The article's framing is very clearly "Successful Man has this advice to be successful" but there's no reason given for why this advice is correct in any meaningful way. So, like I said, it might even be good advice, but it's just an appeal to authority. Successful Man said it, and it sounds like common sense, so it must be true.
For all we know, people that feel victimized by a system might be _more_ likely to want to take action to reform the system. There's no data presented, there's just an anecdote about a time when he faced a hardship and didn't adopt victimhood.
How long could Mr. Munger have kept up this belief system had he not met with success. How important was this mindset when compared to the other incredible benefits he received, here's a leg up he had taken from the very beginning of his Wikipedia article.
> Through the GI Bill Munger took a number of advanced courses through several universities.[6] When he applied to his father's alma mater, Harvard Law School, the dean of admissions rejected him because Munger had not completed an undergraduate degree. However, the dean relented after a call from Roscoe Pound, the former dean of Harvard Law and a Munger family friend.
It is quite easy not to adopt a victim mentality when your family friends can reverse a rejection to Harvard Law.