This reminds me of something a friend said that's stuck with me for ~30 years: 'The bad news about taking responsibility is now it's your fault. The good news about taking responsibility is now you can do something about it.'
Taking extreme ownership of things might make you feel very uncomfortable while starting, but its makes things a lot more easier as they go, because you are for better or worse in control.
You either way in control, you just wish to not exercise it if you don't take extreme ownership of things.
Reminded of two things while we are at it. Sam Altman, once told this in a class - Its easier to start a hard company, than to start an easy company. Then something I heard on Joe Rogan- The more you indulge yourself in doing hard uncomfortable things, the more easier and content it gets as it goes. Its the people who do the easy things that end up bad.
“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” ― Mario Puzo, The Godfather
One of the greatest pieces I’ve read on extreme ownership.
Just because something isn't your fault doesn't mean it's not your responsibility.
Hardship is a guarantee; victimhood is a choice.
If you see a piece of trash, you can think that people are terrible for littering, or you can pick it up. It only takes a small percentage of people littering to destroy an environment but it also only takes a small percentage of people to clean it up.
My mother passed away from cancer when I was 11. Originally when she learned she was terminal, she thought it might be a good idea for me to attend support sessions with the school counselor. Unfortunately in this case, the counselor wasn’t that great at their job, and I came home from school talking about how I was “anxious” and “depressed”—words I had never used before. My mother pulled me out of counseling and told my father, “I didn’t put him in there to feel sorry for himself about the situation.”
She also told my sister and I before she passed to never use her death as an excuse to go through life miserable and sad—there were too many things to be happy about and we should give life purpose.
So I agree with the gist of Charlie’s idea of acting like you aren’t a victim even if you do happen to be one.
That said... I also think that due to either genetic predisposition or extreme environmental factors, there are rare cases where trying to take a positive attitude does not help and can in fact make things worse. Trying to use sheer force of will to “power through” certain situations may lead one to ignore other options (medication for example) and the build-up of a series of continuous failures to “think positively” may result in even worse outcomes where erratic or irreversible decisions are made during an irrational state of mind. I’m not suggesting self-pity, but rather the recognition that there are just some situations you can’t put a positive spin on and it is probably better not to try.
I would just add (your 11 y/o experience notwithstanding) that psychotherapy is a viable, and often preferable option for many. The fitness between therapist and client if definitely a key variable; but my experience with therapy vs meds has dramatically favoured the former.
Agree that there are situations with no positive spin in the moment and maybe there will never be a positive spin; but maybe there’s a _growth-oriented_ spin. Eventually.
It is also true that dispensing this particular advice is self-serving for people in power.
In a revolution, things get worse before they get better if they get better. Revolutions come at huge negative expected value. However, appeasing powerful forces can also have hugely negative expected value. Sometimes the calculus makes sense, and when it does, you should hope that people are appropriately discounting the self-serving advice from the powerful.
I think it's more self-serving for those in power to encourage a culture of victimhood, where they set themselves up as the saviors.
This is a standard political gambit: create or identify a group of victims, and declare that you will get "payback" for them and make their situation better. Of course you don't, but that's OK, you got their votes and you just recycle and amplify that play next time.
If this was the universal(or even most common) outcome of people organizing against sources of suffering in their lives, we'd still be living in stone age city states. The process you describe has time and again led to net-positive outcomes. "It has to work 100% of the time or it's not worth doing" isn't a standard we apply anywhere else.
Sure, co-opting a revolution is a common and effective tactic, but so is "fall in line" (or "don't worry about it" or "focus on yourself" -- all identical from a political action perspective). Revolutions can be actually revolutionary. Often they are not, but they can be. "Fall in line" can never be revolutionary.
those exploiting power have no interest in becoming "saviors". trying to appear as one does not last long as victims as in human nature soon looks for someone to blame- often the most visible
Ironically, revolutionaries and unionists would perfectly follow Munger's advice here: Don't wallow in misery, organise to change the circumstances that lead to it.
Though I'm pretty certain the he didn't have that kind of change in mind when giving this advice.
So you shouldn’t work hard because it benefits the people in power?
That mentality seems pretty self-destructive. It’s dumb to not at least try to impress the people who pay you. That doesn’t mean you can’t also take it easy and strike a healthy balance, but just outright saying society and work are bullshit seems insane when we have such a wealth of resources readily available to us.
> It is also true that dispensing this particular advice is self-serving for people in power.
Most people in power will go out of power via something other than violent revolution. In fact, the whole notion of "elite overproduction" is basically about pointing out the fact that a lot more people aspire to be in power than are actually in power at any given moment. It's an endless game of musical chairs, and if you can avoid playing that particular game you'll be a lot better off on average.
Well I’ve thought about this as a theoretically measurable point after learning about it through sociology texts.
The 'Outrage Factor' is like a measure of how strongly people feel about something and whether they will move into action because of it.
Imagine if you heard news about a big problem – how mad or upset it makes you and others is the 'Outrage Factor.' It's like when you find out someone did something really unfair, and it makes you really angry, especially if it feels unfair, arbitrary or imposed by an unpopular central power, etc.
While it’s certainly true that people in charge generally only say things that keep them in charge, a la the status quo always moves to reinforce its own existence, individuals in power vary a lot in their strategies for staying in power. Some may prioritize transparency and addressing concerns directly, while others may navigate communication or be blatantly manipulating to maintain ‘stability.’
The relationship between power, communication, and outrage factors is complex and influenced by various factors such as societal expectations, political climates, and individual leadership styles. A ‘revolution’ isn’t one thing — it’s all of those things combined and more.
I mean to raise the point that things are frequently much more complicated and simply discounting the advice doesn’t take into account the person saying it, their history of speaking the truth, and what room it was said in.
Obviously the modern world is filled with examples of what you are talking about, so please don’t think I’m trying to counterpoint you — that’s not my intention.
I’m trying to add to the discussion the idea of the ‘outrage factor’ as well as the various styles and politics of who is speaking, because its so very difficult to discern anyone speaking in your best interest (assuming they exist) from the sea of those who most certainly are not and that’s worth considering.
It is also interesting that psychology, sociology and other sciences all have this measurement concept for when people will get pissed off enough to actually take action — with the presumption being that the vast majority of the time, until the tipping point that is an ‘outrage factor,’ they will not. I wonder how well studied and engineered that factor is in modern societies, because I assume it’s very studied, and I also wonder what the impact of broadly deployed AI will be for leadership groups will look like give the obvious benefit of learning to manage this measurement.
The Nazis and Bolshevik’s both swept into power and cemented their power by expertly portraying themselves and their supporters as victims. Somebody convincing themselves and those around them that they are victims can be utterly and totally disconnected from actual victimhood. Victimhood can even be manufactured to create a Casus Belli.
Throw a rock in any hall of power and you won’t be able to help but hit several victims before it hits the floor. Powerful people who accept responsibility for the bad things that happen in the world and blame themselves? Just about the rarest sight one will ever see.
For this reason, I see victimhood as the friend of power, not the foe, as victimhood is basically a universal all purpose justification to do whatever you wanted to do with your power anyways. Actual victims who are powerless usually get fuck all benefit from portraying themselves as victims because they’re actually victims so they’re socially disadvantaged.
I always interpreted this statement as "Don't feel like a victim", not "Don't feel like a victim." It's not an exhortation to suck it up and ignore everything wrong with your life, it's an exhortation to go do something about it. If you feel like conditions are honestly bad enough that a revolution is necessary, go revolt, don't sit there on Hacker News or Reddit complaining about how bad conditions are. If Coke is making you fat and being fat is making you unhappy, stop drinking Coke.
This framing isn't self-serving at all; if more people took it, there'd be a lot fewer folks that the rich and powerful could take advantage of, and a lot more power centers.
But curiously, I've noticed that many people who are powerful and ruthless also have a certain respect for people who will put up clear boundaries and take action to not be taken advantage of by them. It's like they're reluctant sociopaths. "As long as stupid and helpless people exist, they will be taken advantage of by someone, so that someone might as well but me." But it's almost like many of them wish there weren't so many stupid and helpless people, and respect folks who go after what they want even if what they want isn't aligned with their own vision.
Personally, thinking "it's always your fault" is as not nearly as important as thinking "I am the only one who can do anything (or cares) to make this better."
Misfortune isn't always our fault. How we respond to it is.
The "your fault" part of the quote isn't something I take literally, just a pithy way of saying what you said in your post - that I'm the only one who's going to take responsibility for making it better. I also often remember a quote from Unsong - "somebody has to, and no one else will".
I will say, though, that often things I don't like in my life _are_ my fault, and being willing to honestly assess those things is an important razor to cut through the bullshit of self pity.
It's a quote best taken with a slight grain of salt, a lens for looking at a problem which you might not always want to wear. But I like it.
It can also go the other way and something I often have to consciously work against:
You can't always try to make everything better that you become aware of. You can't fix everything. Not everything is your problem to solve. In fact, some (important) people may not like it if you try to solve said problem.
I very much have to make myself stay out of solving everything and just let others take care of it. Especially since I very much don't like other people I see that encounter the slightest problem and they just throw up their hands screaming "I don't know what to do so I'll just stand here and do nothing while someone else solves it". So it's quite the balancing act. Those people need to do more "my fault, I'll solve it" and I need to do more "not my business, let them solve it but secretly keep an eye on it to ensure that it does get done in the end coz it's actually important".
It may or may not be your fault, but it is now your problem to fix.
Whether it's a problem you made so can fix by adjusting your attitude/behavior/skills/etc., or a problem that someone else made, or the universe made, and requires some other fix, focusing not on how things got worse, and actually focusing on how to make things better, is the only way to make things better.
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. They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.
Asking the man who wins the lottery how to live a good life and be successful often ends up with them telling you to do whatever it is that they did. It might even be good advice, but it's a ridiculous appeal to authority. Charlie Munger got all this success and he did X, ok, did other people do X and not achieve this level of success? How many people did not-X and were perfectly successful?
It's subjective finger wagging dressed up in more appealing clothing for those that already agree with the opinions to point at and be happy about. Because at the end of the day, it allows us to blame people's misfortune on them, they've adopted a victim mentality and that's why their lives aren't working out. It allows the class that has the vast majority of wealth to deflect any critical examination of the power structure that perpetuates this state. You aren't underpaid, you just have adopted a victim mindset. You aren't exploited, you just haven't found a way to turn the challenge of paying your rent into riches yet.
Sorry, I have to counter you. Because someone close to me has always been about countering survivorship bias. And they have absolutely ruined their life. It's an easy out that people who are sharing their successes with you and the world have a survivorship bias. This is a fairly recent idea and quite a poison in itself.
What it actually preaches is don't look and emulate the successful people in your environment and society as this is all based on luck. Can't disagree more
Skill and hard work are what buy you the lottery ticket. Luck is what determines if the ticket pays or not. That's why almost all successful people have a string of failures behind them, and why the truism "you've only really failed when you stop trying" exists.
However, you can have skill and put in hard work and still never have the success you're seeking. It happens all the time.
Although much of this depends on how you define "success". I'm assuming here that it means monetary gain, but most people don't have "get rich" as their measure of success. In reality, success is being able to live a life that provides satisfaction and happiness. That's an easier thing to achieve.
There are ways that your comment and the parent are both right.
I’m very much on board with the idea of eschewing victimhood thinking, and I generally see the invocation of survivorship bias as a pretty sad indicator of someone’s attachment to victimhood.
However I also recognize that the world isn’t great at empowering people to get out of difficult situations in life. Once you’re down, the world has all kinds of ways of keeping you down. “Just work hard and save money” seems like simple stuff that anyone can do but it doesn’t get you very far if you’re at the bottom of the heap, especially if you’re dealing with illness, family problems, or other burdens.
I do believe there are things that almost anyone (without irrevocable health problems) can do to go from a bad situation to a very good one over the long term (I’ve done them), but these things are not widely known or accepted by mainstream society.
So I sympathize with the sense of futility that many people hold.
"My entire childhood I watched both my parents, who both had 2 jobs, work themselves non-stop to try to provide for us. They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit."
You're here, are you not? Ironically it's Charlie Munger who is not. The game of life is played to stay in the game. If you're writing this comment, it seems like they succeeded, at least in the main storyline. They may have failed or chose not to start a bunch of the side quests, but it looks like they won the primary game.
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 bad when it’s this extreme.
That said I wish his family well and am sorry for his passing. He was always a gentleman and kind to the core.
It's really funny reading his "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" lecture and citing himself as an example, and offhandedly mentioning his numerous wealthy relatives.
Coming from a rich family doesn't primarily make things easy; it nearly eliminates the consequences of risk-taking and allows for failing until you stop failing.
People who aren't wealthy can't take the gambles and risks the wealthy do.
Jim Carey has a quote about his Dad: “My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant, and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don’t want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”
The "avoid thinking like you're a victim" is a tool to help motivation and attitude but not sufficient for success. You have to be smart enough to know the meta-model of inputs and outputs in the world to maximize your chance of ending up where you want to be.
You could work as hard as possible flipping burgers, it won't make you a billionaire, and even a very dumb person could see that.
You have to merely understand the paths people take in life that lead to where you want to be, evaluate the stochastic horizons, and act in accordance to your best bet on what would work. Whether or not, in this process, you consider yourself the ultimate master of your circumstances or a helpless victim flailing at the machinery of a cruel system makes no difference. All that matters is what affects how you think and what you do, and all the feedback loops therein.
> They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.
Not doing those things didn't enable them to get ahead far enough to not have to both work two jobs. But drinking or doing drugs would have hurt compared to not doing them. So would feeling like a victim.
I think they're saying the interaction effect of doing drugs, drinking and considering oneself a victim is negligible on overall success.
It doesn't seem like a bold claim to me. I've known plenty of poor, struggling working class people. The only impact drinking or claiming they're a victim have is influencing how much fun they have at parties.
I've happen to know plenty of wildly successful people who also drink and/or think they're victims. Again, primary effect I've noticed seems to be how much fun they are at parties.
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 smart and hard to solve it and that’s going to give you a pretty damn good shot.
> You can’t change the hand your dealt or what life continues to deal you, but you can keep working smart and hard to solve it and that’s going to give you a pretty damn good shot.
This reads like "pick yourself up by your bootstraps": an impossible task. Could you parrot this line in front of a Walmart checkout clerk?
So what is the upper limit of how hard someone should work until they can reasonably acknowledge that shit is fucked up and that they're a victim of circumstance? Should I just power through chronic fatigue for 10, 20, 30 years before applying for disability (which forever limits how much wealth I am allowed to accumulate)? Should someone just keep fighting a fatal cancer diagnosis, throwing their family into incalculable medical debt, until they die with a crushed ribcage from a nurse slamming their dead heart through the sternum because they're full code?
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 victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.
Applying this to your specific case, if your parents had embraced a victim mentality, there's a likelihood that they would have experienced less success, happiness, etc.
An article that included statistical data to that point would not have received this criticism.
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.
You are missing the point. It is not about misfortune. Yes there are millions of people like your parents who worked hard and struggled to provide. But did they choose to be victims ? No. You can have misfortune and still choose not be a victim and blame others. Also, turns out that they did a decent job raising you where you are able to be a software engineer (from your HN profile). So I would say they won. Wouldn't you ?
> They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.
I think this highlights the culturally ingrained measures of success that most of us default to reflexively.
In a world where most of the circumstances around us are out of our control, finding a way to live without falling into victimhood is success by some measures.
Here’s how I think about this: falling into a victim mindset is a good way to stay stuck. Finding a way to avoid this mindset doesn’t guarantee someone will get unstuck, but it increases the odds. And if they stay stuck, they’re only dealing with the circumstance they’re in instead of also dealing with the added layer of psychological distress of victimhood.
I think it’s also critical to still call out fallacious ideas, e.g. being underpaid is a real issue that needs to be solved.
The thing about victimhood is that it primarily impacts the person who engages in the thought patterns and doesn’t actually change the situation for the better. In terms of pure utility, it’s not worth the brain cycles.
This does not mean that the circumstances that lead to the mindset are not serious issues that need to be solved.
> 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.
Yes, but so what. We're on HN, we're supposed to be well aware that 90% if not 99% of all ventures will fail miserably. (In fact, the main benefits of 'working hard' in startup culture are arguably ancillary ones, such as the chance of networking socially with successful folks. To some extent, success is beside the point.)
I recently watched a coworker lose a job by embodying this very logic.
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.
Yes. All communication is miscommunication. "[Y]ou just fix it as best you can" includes you getting help to fix it. Getting help is one of your abilities.
So, for example, it's up to you to oppose discrimination via the legal system - it's your fault you're letting them get away with it. It's up to you to organize a union to counter exploitative practices - it's your fault you haven't done that yet.
It's up to somebody to do something - it's up to you. If you're neglected what you can do, it's your fault.
Munger isn't saying it's literally true, but that it is an effective way to face life (this "attitude... works" in the quote).
Asking for help is a perfectly encouraged way of fixing a problem. That's just a modality. You're still taking ownership of the situation and making steps to remedy.
I'd go so far as saying that asking for help is often the quickest and fastest way of fixing an issue. People can't help unless they a) know you need help and b) know what kind of help. Just sitting there fuming in your victimhood won't inspire people to rush over and help.
Charlie Munger had great advice in general. And I've learned a lot of good from him.
But I will never get over the hypocrisy of owning a quarter of Coca Cola and constantly criticizing Americans for being overweight (he used words like "sloth").
He didn't make money on you buying the "occasional" Coke. He made money by addicting you (the royal you) to Coke to want it over, and over, and over again.
This is weird, I like drinking Coke occasionally and am not obese. Coke isn't responsible for all obesity. This is just another way to victimize yourself which makes it much harder to actually solve any problem.
Hypocrisy is spending billions of dollars to convince people to buy sugar water and then complaining about their weight. I guess you could call it savvy, but I think predatory is a more apt description.
If Buffett and Munger wanted,they could certainly point out that Coca-Cola and Pepsi both benefit from being on EBT/SNAP lists as acceptable foods to purchase, and ask that soft drinks as a class of foods be removed.
Last I looked, about 9.5% of total EBT/SNAP money for food (that is, money from taxpayers that are supposed to help feed those in need properly) is spent on soft drinks. No person in need, needs soft drinks, especially when we have high rates of diabetes and obesity among the poor.
Just because someone is in need doesn't mean they can't spend some money on soft drinks. This is classist. It's basically "because you're poor you don't deserve chocolate, because you're more likely to be obese".
9.5% of that money being spent on soft drinks is not the problem. The problem is the amount of processed garbage and sugar in most American food.
Buying healthy food is unfortunately a privilege. To have the time to stay fit/healthy (whether going to the gym or taking walks) in this world of processed garbage is a privilege, because time is a precious resource that some people seriously cannot afford.
For all the posts here about the excessive costs of higher education, people sure seem to be mad that this fellow tried to do something about it. I'd have been fine with a "prison style dorm" if it had reduced my educational costs.
>Munger’s $200 million donation to the university is contingent on the structure being built to his windowless specifications.
Reason being:
>“Our design is clever,” Munger assured skeptics. “Our buildings are going to be efficient.” In addition to cutting costs and foiling potential defenestrations, his design would force students out of their sleeping cubbies and into communal spaces—with real sunlight—where, he said, they would engage with one another.
It seems to me encouraging university students to spend more time alone would be more conducive to getting work done. Overall Munger seemed to have had this notion a lot of old people have that the youth need to suffer because
of-course they suffered more.
A private room for a reasonable price in the world’s most desirable climate that a student can just go walk to on a lark. Why don’t we just send them to a super max!
Munger is an awful person for trying to help students get an education without resorting to crippling debt.
Why? For the most part, people are overweight by choice, not by some unavoidable draw of Coke. Not to mention that they have a ton of zero or low calorie coke options that people could choose.
Many people are overweight by choice in the same way alcoholics or crack addicts are addicted to substances by choice. There are very powerful chemical and subconscious factors at play that make it incredibly difficult to exercise one's will. That semiglutides are proving to be remarkably effective at helping people both make better dietary decisions as well as reduce substance use, should tell you that the problem isn't as simplistic as you've made it out to be.
The phenomenon of people from skinnier (but developed) countries spending some time in the US and complaining that they gain a lot of weight suggests a pretty damn strong environmental component. Strong to the point of overwhelming most other factors, to my eye, at least.
This is kind of missing the point. People are in groups that do all kinds of things normatively that add up to obesity, like dualistic thinking leading to depression while be embedded in a culture of dissociation. Yes, it's a choice, and as the cultures that gatekeep people from meeting their needs grows and spreads, making and sustaining that choice becomes harder. Maintaining cultures that harm is also a choice. No one is an island. We're all programming each other and ourselves in every moment while not taking care about how we do it.
Readit News
Charlie Munger has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38451278
You either way in control, you just wish to not exercise it if you don't take extreme ownership of things.
Reminded of two things while we are at it. Sam Altman, once told this in a class - Its easier to start a hard company, than to start an easy company. Then something I heard on Joe Rogan- The more you indulge yourself in doing hard uncomfortable things, the more easier and content it gets as it goes. Its the people who do the easy things that end up bad.
“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” ― Mario Puzo, The Godfather
One of the greatest pieces I’ve read on extreme ownership.
Just because something isn't your fault doesn't mean it's not your responsibility.
Hardship is a guarantee; victimhood is a choice.
If you see a piece of trash, you can think that people are terrible for littering, or you can pick it up. It only takes a small percentage of people littering to destroy an environment but it also only takes a small percentage of people to clean it up.
She also told my sister and I before she passed to never use her death as an excuse to go through life miserable and sad—there were too many things to be happy about and we should give life purpose.
So I agree with the gist of Charlie’s idea of acting like you aren’t a victim even if you do happen to be one.
That said... I also think that due to either genetic predisposition or extreme environmental factors, there are rare cases where trying to take a positive attitude does not help and can in fact make things worse. Trying to use sheer force of will to “power through” certain situations may lead one to ignore other options (medication for example) and the build-up of a series of continuous failures to “think positively” may result in even worse outcomes where erratic or irreversible decisions are made during an irrational state of mind. I’m not suggesting self-pity, but rather the recognition that there are just some situations you can’t put a positive spin on and it is probably better not to try.
I would just add (your 11 y/o experience notwithstanding) that psychotherapy is a viable, and often preferable option for many. The fitness between therapist and client if definitely a key variable; but my experience with therapy vs meds has dramatically favoured the former.
Agree that there are situations with no positive spin in the moment and maybe there will never be a positive spin; but maybe there’s a _growth-oriented_ spin. Eventually.
It is also true that dispensing this particular advice is self-serving for people in power.
In a revolution, things get worse before they get better if they get better. Revolutions come at huge negative expected value. However, appeasing powerful forces can also have hugely negative expected value. Sometimes the calculus makes sense, and when it does, you should hope that people are appropriately discounting the self-serving advice from the powerful.
This is a standard political gambit: create or identify a group of victims, and declare that you will get "payback" for them and make their situation better. Of course you don't, but that's OK, you got their votes and you just recycle and amplify that play next time.
Though I'm pretty certain the he didn't have that kind of change in mind when giving this advice.
That mentality seems pretty self-destructive. It’s dumb to not at least try to impress the people who pay you. That doesn’t mean you can’t also take it easy and strike a healthy balance, but just outright saying society and work are bullshit seems insane when we have such a wealth of resources readily available to us.
Most people in power will go out of power via something other than violent revolution. In fact, the whole notion of "elite overproduction" is basically about pointing out the fact that a lot more people aspire to be in power than are actually in power at any given moment. It's an endless game of musical chairs, and if you can avoid playing that particular game you'll be a lot better off on average.
The 'Outrage Factor' is like a measure of how strongly people feel about something and whether they will move into action because of it.
Imagine if you heard news about a big problem – how mad or upset it makes you and others is the 'Outrage Factor.' It's like when you find out someone did something really unfair, and it makes you really angry, especially if it feels unfair, arbitrary or imposed by an unpopular central power, etc.
While it’s certainly true that people in charge generally only say things that keep them in charge, a la the status quo always moves to reinforce its own existence, individuals in power vary a lot in their strategies for staying in power. Some may prioritize transparency and addressing concerns directly, while others may navigate communication or be blatantly manipulating to maintain ‘stability.’
The relationship between power, communication, and outrage factors is complex and influenced by various factors such as societal expectations, political climates, and individual leadership styles. A ‘revolution’ isn’t one thing — it’s all of those things combined and more.
I mean to raise the point that things are frequently much more complicated and simply discounting the advice doesn’t take into account the person saying it, their history of speaking the truth, and what room it was said in.
Obviously the modern world is filled with examples of what you are talking about, so please don’t think I’m trying to counterpoint you — that’s not my intention.
I’m trying to add to the discussion the idea of the ‘outrage factor’ as well as the various styles and politics of who is speaking, because its so very difficult to discern anyone speaking in your best interest (assuming they exist) from the sea of those who most certainly are not and that’s worth considering.
It is also interesting that psychology, sociology and other sciences all have this measurement concept for when people will get pissed off enough to actually take action — with the presumption being that the vast majority of the time, until the tipping point that is an ‘outrage factor,’ they will not. I wonder how well studied and engineered that factor is in modern societies, because I assume it’s very studied, and I also wonder what the impact of broadly deployed AI will be for leadership groups will look like give the obvious benefit of learning to manage this measurement.
Throw a rock in any hall of power and you won’t be able to help but hit several victims before it hits the floor. Powerful people who accept responsibility for the bad things that happen in the world and blame themselves? Just about the rarest sight one will ever see.
For this reason, I see victimhood as the friend of power, not the foe, as victimhood is basically a universal all purpose justification to do whatever you wanted to do with your power anyways. Actual victims who are powerless usually get fuck all benefit from portraying themselves as victims because they’re actually victims so they’re socially disadvantaged.
This framing isn't self-serving at all; if more people took it, there'd be a lot fewer folks that the rich and powerful could take advantage of, and a lot more power centers.
But curiously, I've noticed that many people who are powerful and ruthless also have a certain respect for people who will put up clear boundaries and take action to not be taken advantage of by them. It's like they're reluctant sociopaths. "As long as stupid and helpless people exist, they will be taken advantage of by someone, so that someone might as well but me." But it's almost like many of them wish there weren't so many stupid and helpless people, and respect folks who go after what they want even if what they want isn't aligned with their own vision.
Misfortune isn't always our fault. How we respond to it is.
I will say, though, that often things I don't like in my life _are_ my fault, and being willing to honestly assess those things is an important razor to cut through the bullshit of self pity.
It's a quote best taken with a slight grain of salt, a lens for looking at a problem which you might not always want to wear. But I like it.
You can't always try to make everything better that you become aware of. You can't fix everything. Not everything is your problem to solve. In fact, some (important) people may not like it if you try to solve said problem.
I very much have to make myself stay out of solving everything and just let others take care of it. Especially since I very much don't like other people I see that encounter the slightest problem and they just throw up their hands screaming "I don't know what to do so I'll just stand here and do nothing while someone else solves it". So it's quite the balancing act. Those people need to do more "my fault, I'll solve it" and I need to do more "not my business, let them solve it but secretly keep an eye on it to ensure that it does get done in the end coz it's actually important".
In the motorcycling world we like to say "The cemetery is full of people who had right of way"
It may or may not be your fault, but it is now your problem to fix.
Whether it's a problem you made so can fix by adjusting your attitude/behavior/skills/etc., or a problem that someone else made, or the universe made, and requires some other fix, focusing not on how things got worse, and actually focusing on how to make things better, is the only way to make things better.
My entire childhood I watched both my parents, who both had 2 jobs, work themselves non-stop to try to provide for us. They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.
Asking the man who wins the lottery how to live a good life and be successful often ends up with them telling you to do whatever it is that they did. It might even be good advice, but it's a ridiculous appeal to authority. Charlie Munger got all this success and he did X, ok, did other people do X and not achieve this level of success? How many people did not-X and were perfectly successful?
It's subjective finger wagging dressed up in more appealing clothing for those that already agree with the opinions to point at and be happy about. Because at the end of the day, it allows us to blame people's misfortune on them, they've adopted a victim mentality and that's why their lives aren't working out. It allows the class that has the vast majority of wealth to deflect any critical examination of the power structure that perpetuates this state. You aren't underpaid, you just have adopted a victim mindset. You aren't exploited, you just haven't found a way to turn the challenge of paying your rent into riches yet.
What it actually preaches is don't look and emulate the successful people in your environment and society as this is all based on luck. Can't disagree more
Skill and hard work are what buy you the lottery ticket. Luck is what determines if the ticket pays or not. That's why almost all successful people have a string of failures behind them, and why the truism "you've only really failed when you stop trying" exists.
However, you can have skill and put in hard work and still never have the success you're seeking. It happens all the time.
Although much of this depends on how you define "success". I'm assuming here that it means monetary gain, but most people don't have "get rich" as their measure of success. In reality, success is being able to live a life that provides satisfaction and happiness. That's an easier thing to achieve.
I’m very much on board with the idea of eschewing victimhood thinking, and I generally see the invocation of survivorship bias as a pretty sad indicator of someone’s attachment to victimhood.
However I also recognize that the world isn’t great at empowering people to get out of difficult situations in life. Once you’re down, the world has all kinds of ways of keeping you down. “Just work hard and save money” seems like simple stuff that anyone can do but it doesn’t get you very far if you’re at the bottom of the heap, especially if you’re dealing with illness, family problems, or other burdens.
I do believe there are things that almost anyone (without irrevocable health problems) can do to go from a bad situation to a very good one over the long term (I’ve done them), but these things are not widely known or accepted by mainstream society.
So I sympathize with the sense of futility that many people hold.
You're here, are you not? Ironically it's Charlie Munger who is not. The game of life is played to stay in the game. If you're writing this comment, it seems like they succeeded, at least in the main storyline. They may have failed or chose not to start a bunch of the side quests, but it looks like they won the primary game.
Not tons. Millions. If not hundreds of millions.
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 bad when it’s this extreme.
That said I wish his family well and am sorry for his passing. He was always a gentleman and kind to the core.
Coming from a rich family doesn't primarily make things easy; it nearly eliminates the consequences of risk-taking and allows for failing until you stop failing.
People who aren't wealthy can't take the gambles and risks the wealthy do.
You could work as hard as possible flipping burgers, it won't make you a billionaire, and even a very dumb person could see that.
You have to merely understand the paths people take in life that lead to where you want to be, evaluate the stochastic horizons, and act in accordance to your best bet on what would work. Whether or not, in this process, you consider yourself the ultimate master of your circumstances or a helpless victim flailing at the machinery of a cruel system makes no difference. All that matters is what affects how you think and what you do, and all the feedback loops therein.
Not doing those things didn't enable them to get ahead far enough to not have to both work two jobs. But drinking or doing drugs would have hurt compared to not doing them. So would feeling like a victim.
Are you saying that your family would have been the same had your parents done drugs or considered themselves victims?
If so, why do you think that? Seems like a very bold claim. If not, what are you actually saying?
It doesn't seem like a bold claim to me. I've known plenty of poor, struggling working class people. The only impact drinking or claiming they're a victim have is influencing how much fun they have at parties.
I've happen to know plenty of wildly successful people who also drink and/or think they're victims. Again, primary effect I've noticed seems to be how much fun they are at parties.
This reads like "pick yourself up by your bootstraps": an impossible task. Could you parrot this line in front of a Walmart checkout clerk?
"At 31 years old, Charlie Munger was divorced, broke, and burying his 9 year old son, who had died from cancer"
But he persevered to become one of the most successful people on the planet.
No doubt he was a brilliant human and that helped tremendously, but he didn't think of himself as a victim.
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.
Applying this to your specific case, if your parents had embraced a victim mentality, there's a likelihood that they would have experienced less success, happiness, etc.
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.
I think this highlights the culturally ingrained measures of success that most of us default to reflexively.
In a world where most of the circumstances around us are out of our control, finding a way to live without falling into victimhood is success by some measures.
Here’s how I think about this: falling into a victim mindset is a good way to stay stuck. Finding a way to avoid this mindset doesn’t guarantee someone will get unstuck, but it increases the odds. And if they stay stuck, they’re only dealing with the circumstance they’re in instead of also dealing with the added layer of psychological distress of victimhood.
I think it’s also critical to still call out fallacious ideas, e.g. being underpaid is a real issue that needs to be solved.
The thing about victimhood is that it primarily impacts the person who engages in the thought patterns and doesn’t actually change the situation for the better. In terms of pure utility, it’s not worth the brain cycles.
This does not mean that the circumstances that lead to the mindset are not serious issues that need to be solved.
Yes, but so what. We're on HN, we're supposed to be well aware that 90% if not 99% of all ventures will fail miserably. (In fact, the main benefits of 'working hard' in startup culture are arguably ancillary ones, such as the chance of networking socially with successful folks. To some extent, success is beside the point.)
Deleted Comment
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.
So, for example, it's up to you to oppose discrimination via the legal system - it's your fault you're letting them get away with it. It's up to you to organize a union to counter exploitative practices - it's your fault you haven't done that yet.
It's up to somebody to do something - it's up to you. If you're neglected what you can do, it's your fault.
Munger isn't saying it's literally true, but that it is an effective way to face life (this "attitude... works" in the quote).
Asking for help is a perfectly encouraged way of fixing a problem. That's just a modality. You're still taking ownership of the situation and making steps to remedy.
I'd go so far as saying that asking for help is often the quickest and fastest way of fixing an issue. People can't help unless they a) know you need help and b) know what kind of help. Just sitting there fuming in your victimhood won't inspire people to rush over and help.
But I will never get over the hypocrisy of owning a quarter of Coca Cola and constantly criticizing Americans for being overweight (he used words like "sloth").
I used to be that way. I'm glad I gave it up.
I drink about one soft drink per year, and it's a Coke. (Which reminds me, I don't think I've had my drink for 2023!)
If all world citizens limited themselves to my rate of indulgence, Berkshire Hathaway's KO stake would be worth quite a bit less.
That's not hypocrisy, that's savvy.
Hypocrisy is an American drinking Coke while complaining about their weight.
Last I looked, about 9.5% of total EBT/SNAP money for food (that is, money from taxpayers that are supposed to help feed those in need properly) is spent on soft drinks. No person in need, needs soft drinks, especially when we have high rates of diabetes and obesity among the poor.
9.5% of that money being spent on soft drinks is not the problem. The problem is the amount of processed garbage and sugar in most American food.
Buying healthy food is unfortunately a privilege. To have the time to stay fit/healthy (whether going to the gym or taking walks) in this world of processed garbage is a privilege, because time is a precious resource that some people seriously cannot afford.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
https://www.fastcompany.com/90740511/heres-what-its-like-liv...
Then I found myself in a windowless room for a day (voluntarily) with a PC and no internet. Literally staring at a wall.
The most productive day I've had in a couple of decades.
And I started to have second thoughts about his dorm plan. Maybe he was on to something.
Reason being:
>“Our design is clever,” Munger assured skeptics. “Our buildings are going to be efficient.” In addition to cutting costs and foiling potential defenestrations, his design would force students out of their sleeping cubbies and into communal spaces—with real sunlight—where, he said, they would engage with one another.
It seems to me encouraging university students to spend more time alone would be more conducive to getting work done. Overall Munger seemed to have had this notion a lot of old people have that the youth need to suffer because of-course they suffered more.
Munger is an awful person for trying to help students get an education without resorting to crippling debt.
Deleted Comment