Charlie Munger took ideas seriously
After Omaha, I can't stop thinking about the architect of Berkshire Hathaway.
I was given five minutes to break the news of Charlie Munger’s death.
It was November 2023. The 99-year-old, longtime partner to Warren Buffett had just died. I was still a reporter at Business Insider, and my editor told me to write the story as fast as possible.
More than a million people ended up reading that piece.
I returned from Omaha a week ago, and Munger’s presence still loomed large at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.
It was the second year in a row Buffett hosted shareholders without his partner, but he brought up Munger’s ideas repeatedly on stage.
The quote above, pulled from the back cover of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, distills his worldview:
“Take a simple, basic idea, and take it very seriously.”
It might be the most useful guidance anyone has ever shared about how to do hard things.
Munger’s career stands as a rebuttal to much of what people praise today. He valued clarity, subtraction and patience, as Poor Charlie’s Almanack captures so well.
I never saw him speak in person, as I did with Buffett, but I feel an odd affinity for Munger. He treated reading like a craft, pushed back on intellectual laziness, and knew his own limitations.
Buffett always credits Munger as the “architect” behind Berkshire Hathaway. That feels right. His witticisms, like the one above, are deceptively deep and hold up well across decades.
Heeding his call to take simple ideas seriously seems like a sure recipe for momentum.
It also feels true, too, that long-term thinking is what creates leverage in an increasingly scattered, frenzied world.
I’ve held this belief for some time, and I’m working hard to take it as seriously as possible. I hope Munger would be proud.
Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief of Opening Bell Daily
(If you’re interested, here’s the Business Insider article I wrote in November 2023).
For more of my reporting from Omaha: