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Invert, always invert

Published on June 12, 2026

Charlie Munger liked to repeat a story about a country fellow who said: “I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I’d never go there.” It sounds like a joke, but hidden within it is one of the most useful ideas about thinking clearly. It also has a surprisingly distinguished pedigree.
Topics: Thinking Prevention Care
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Editor’s pick: Quote

A quote worth reflecting on today:

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed how much Warren reads—and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

 Charlie Munger
✓ Verified quote (primary source)
Topics: Reading Humor
More about this quote → More about Charlie Munger →

Today’s most popular quotes

What our readers are viewing right now:

  1. “Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.”— Charlie Munger Primary source

  2. “Ours is the commencement of a flying age, and I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting.”

    — Amelia Earhart Primary source

  3. “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

    — Richard Feynman Primary source

  4. “So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.”

    — Charlie Munger Primary source

  5. “The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting, so that the big people don’t always win—is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy.”

    — Charlie Munger Primary source

Today’s most popular topics

What’s catching our readers’ attention:
  1. Time Management
  2. Status Quo
  3. Attention to details
  4. Learning
  5. Scrambled Eggs

Editor’s pick: Book

Our daily recommendation for the curious reader:

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

by Leonardo da Vinci (1888)

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Jean Paul Richter, is a thematic anthology of Leonardo’s writings on art, science, anatomy, engineering, and philosophy—revealing the genius’s insights, observations, and inventions through his own reflective and analytical prose.
Topics: Experience Learning Memory
More about this book → More about Leonardo da Vinci →

Today’s most popular reads

See what our readers are picking up:
  1. Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle
    by Richard P. Feynman
  2. The meaning of it all
    by Richard P. Feynman
  3. Horizon: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
    by Richard P. Feynman
  4. Poor Charlie’s Almanack
    by Charlie Munger (compiled by Peter D. Kaufman)
  5. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
    by Richard P. Feynman

Today’s most popular minds

The thinkers our readers are curious about today:
  1. Arnold J. Toynbee
    English historian
  2. Abraham Lincoln
    President of the United States
  3. Charlie Munger
    American businessman and investor
  4. Richard Feynman
    American physicist
  5. Joseph M. Juran
    American engineer, management consultant, and author

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