Someone posted this fantastic Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio) talk on Youtube about two weeks ago. Below is the link to the video followed by my 10-point notes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ibabROYccs
1- Humility means you know the edge of your competency and you don’t arrogantly step over the boundary.
2 - It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it. You are a disaster if you don’t know the edge of your competency.
3 - There’s all this folly out there and I thought if I could just avoid all the folly, maybe I can get an advantage without being good at anything.
4 - It really works to tackle much of life by inversion, where you just twist the thing backwards and work that way.
5 - Another trick that I got very early was that I love big ideas that have a lot of instructive power. And I like them so well that I didn’t mind when they were in somebody else’s territory. I just went in and took the ideas. So I paid no attention to the territorial boundaries of academic discipline. I just grabbed the big ideas that I could, and then I used them in daily activities to solve problems and amuse myself and self-education and so on.
6 - I am a collector of inanity and I’ve cataloged the inanities on structures in my head. Collecting inanities is just wonderful.
7 - Another trick is that I am interested in seeing how these ideas interplay together. If you do it in your head, you are in a territory where there’s not much competition. This is a less crowded mental road in life and it really works.
8 - I have another idea that I found very useful – I have always liked Occam’s Razor (I had to look this up from Wikipedia– this is a principle which states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better). You can argue that Eistein’s whole career was just a marvelous demonstration of Occam’s Razor.
9 - If you don’t see how all these things work and how they interplay, of course (you’ll be in trouble). The way to get that competency, like any other competency, is to adopt the necessary elements in practice, using that over a considerable period of time on a considerable area of complexity.
10 - I just picked the obvious things that were on the river bank with organized common sense.
