How to Guarantee a Life of Misery
Charlie Munger — Harvard-Westlake School Commencement, June 13, 1986
Overview
Munger opens by riffing on a Johnny Carson commencement speech where Carson — instead of telling graduates how to be happy — told them how to guarantee misery. Munger loved the approach and expanded on it with four additional prescriptions of his own. The genius of the speech is its use of inversion: by studying how to create misery, you learn what to avoid.
Carson’s Three Prescriptions for Misery
Johnny Carson’s original prescriptions, which Munger endorses wholeheartedly:
1. Ingest Chemicals to Alter Your Mood
Munger shares that of his four closest friends from youth, two died with alcohol as a contributing factor, and a third is a living alcoholic. Addiction is deceptive — it creeps up gradually.
2. Envy
Letting the success of others corrode your own satisfaction. Munger notes that of the Seven Deadly Sins, envy is the worst because “it’s the only one that’s no fun at all.”
3. Resentment
Holding onto bitterness. Munger quotes Samuel Johnson: “Life is hard enough to swallow without squeezing in the bitter rind of resentment.” He also tells the story of Benjamin Disraeli, who as Prime Minister learned to give up vengeance as an instrument of policy — but kept a drawer with the names of people who wronged him, reviewing it from time to time for private satisfaction.
Munger’s Four Additional Prescriptions for Misery
4. Be Unreliable
“If you will faithfully do what you have engaged to do, this single habit will more than compensate for all other deficiencies.”
Munger argues that unreliability is so destructive it can cancel out every other virtue. He tells the story of a college roommate who was severely dyslexic but extremely reliable — that man went on to become chief executive of a multibillion-dollar corporation with a wonderful family.
5. Learn Only From Your Own Experience
Refuse to learn vicariously from the mistakes and successes of others. Ignore the best work of the greatest minds in history.
Munger invokes Newton: “If I have seen a little farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” He contrasts this with people who, as Philip Wylie put it, “You couldn’t squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn.”
6. When Life Knocks You Down, Stay Down
Give up after the first severe reversal. Never recover. Munger references the joke: “If at first you don’t succeed, well, so much for hang gliding.”
He then cites the epitaph of Epictetus — “Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favoured by Gods” — as proof that a life of setbacks can still be a life of greatness.
7. Ignore the Power of Inversion
Fail to look at problems backward. Munger’s most famous intellectual tool comes from the mathematician Carl Jacobi, who repeated: “Invert, always invert.”
Examples of great inverters:
- Einstein developed special relativity by inverting assumptions about time and space that Newton took for granted
- Darwin made it a habit to prioritize disconfirming evidence — seeking to destroy his own best-loved ideas
- The rustic who said, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there”
Einstein attributed his success to: “Curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism.” By self-criticism, he meant the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.
Key Takeaways
| Prescription (Misery) | The Inverse (What To Do) |
|---|---|
| Ingest chemicals | Stay sober; addiction creeps up gradually |
| Envy | Focus on your own progress, not others’ success |
| Resentment | Let go of bitterness; it poisons only you |
| Be unreliable | Be reliable — it compensates for many weaknesses |
| Learn only from yourself | Read voraciously; stand on the shoulders of giants |
| Stay down after failure | Get back up; resilience is non-negotiable |
| Ignore inversion | Always invert — study failure to find success |
People Referenced
| Person | Context |
|---|---|
| Johnny Carson | Original “prescriptions for misery” commencement speech |
| Samuel Johnson | Quoted on resentment |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Gave up vengeance as policy, kept a private enemies list |
| Isaac Newton | “Stood on the shoulders of giants” |
| Epictetus | Slave who became one of history’s greatest philosophers |
| Croesus | Rich king who learned Solon’s lesson about happiness |
| Carl Jacobi | “Invert, always invert” |
| Albert Einstein | Inverted Newton’s assumptions; practiced self-criticism |
| Charles Darwin | Prioritized disconfirming evidence |
| Philip Wylie | Quoted on people who refuse to learn |
For the full speech, see the PDF.