Charlie Munger.Uncommon Sense
1. “[When] somebody says that old Joe has common sense, they don’t mean that. They mean he’s got uncommon sense. People who are sensible on everything they deal with, they’re uncommon — not common. Most people are a mass of crazy prejudices.”
“[当]有人说老乔有常识时，他们并不是这个意思。他们的意思是他有不寻常的常识。对他们所处理的每件事都很理智的人，他们是不寻常的——而不是常见的。大多数人都是一堆疯狂的偏见。”
2. “I would like my legacy to be a more relentless determination to develop and use what I call an ‘uncommon sense’.”
“我希望我的遗产是更坚定的决心去发展和使用我所称之为‘不寻常的常识’的东西。”
3. “The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results — good and bad — with a certain amount of stoicism.”
“幸福生活的第一条规则是降低预期。如果你有不切实际的期望，你会一辈子都感到痛苦。你应该有合理的期望，并以一定的坚忍态度接受生活的结果——无论好坏。”
4. “If you have unreasonable demands on life, you’re almost like a bird that’s trying to destroy himself by bashing his wings on the edge of the cage.”
“如果你对生活有不合理的要求，你就像一只试图用翅膀撞击笼子边缘而自我毁灭的鸟。”
5. “Gentlemen, may each of you rise by spending each day of a long life aiming low.”
“各位先生，愿你们每个人都能通过每天的低预期来提升自己，度过漫长的一生。”
In 1986, trustee Charlie Munger delivered the commencement address at the Harvard School (now Harvard-Westlake) in Los Angeles. In it, he urged the graduating class to avoid the standard stupidities and pitfalls of life. And, as Munger wryly noted, while eliminating these common missteps might look to the untrained eye like “aiming low” — it’s actually the surest path to lasting success.
1986 年，受托人查理·芒格在洛杉矶的哈佛学校（现在的哈佛-韦斯特莱克）发表了毕业典礼演讲。在演讲中，他敦促毕业班避免生活中的常见愚蠢和陷阱。正如芒格讽刺地指出的，虽然消除这些常见失误在未经训练的眼中可能看起来像是“目标过低”——但实际上这是通往持久成功的最可靠途径。
6. “We all start out stupid and we all have a hard time staying sensible. You have to keep working at it. Berkshire would be a wreck today if it were run by what Warren and I knew when we started. We kept learning. I don’t think we’d have all the billions of stock of Coca-Cola that we now have if we hadn’t bought See’s [Candies]. There were huge consequences to getting over that last stupidity.”
“我们一开始都是愚蠢的，而且我们都很难保持理智。你必须不断努力。伯克希尔如果是由我和沃伦在刚开始时所掌握的知识来经营的，今天肯定会一塌糊涂。我们一直在学习。如果我们没有买下See's Candies，我不认为我们今天会拥有那么多的可口可乐股票。克服最后的愚蠢带来了巨大的影响。”
7. “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than when they got up and, boy, does that help — particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”
“我常常看到一些人在人生中崛起，他们并不是最聪明的，有时甚至不是最勤奋的，但他们是学习机器。他们每晚睡觉时比起床时更聪明一点，天哪，这真的很有帮助——尤其是当你面临漫长的旅程时。”
8. “There is no better teacher than history in determining the future … There are answers worth billions of dollars in a history book.”
“历史是决定未来的最佳老师……历史书中有价值数十亿美元的答案。”
9. “I almost worship reason. You can argue that Henry Singleton did, too — and, certainly, Warren Buffett does, too. The people I know that are good, they feel you have a duty to become as wise as you can be by constantly studying things and thinking about them.”
“我几乎崇拜理性。你可以说亨利·辛顿也是这样——当然，沃伦·巴菲特也是这样。我认识的那些优秀的人，他们觉得你有责任通过不断学习和思考来变得尽可能聪明。”
10. “Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris — I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people.”
“像沃伦一样，我非常渴望致富。不是因为我想要法拉利——我想要的是独立。我非常渴望这种独立。我觉得向别人发送发票是没有尊严的。”
11. “The big money is not in the buying and the selling — but in the waiting.”
“大钱不在于买卖，而在于等待。”
12. “My Berkshire Hathaway stock cost me $16 a share. It’s now selling for almost $300,000 a share. That’s been a very good investment. It took a long time. It was a long-term investment where I liked the people I was investing with and I liked the company I was investing in and I just sat there for more than 50 years. Lo and behold, it has worked out very well.”
“我的伯克希尔·哈撒韦股票每股花费我 16 美元。现在每股的售价几乎达到了 300,000 美元。这是一项非常好的投资。花了很长时间。这是一项长期投资，我喜欢我投资的那些人，也喜欢我投资的公司，我就这样坐了超过 50 年。结果，事情发展得非常好。”
13. “It is said that an institution is often the lengthened shadow of a single man … We are, in part, engaged in the business of trying to invest in the lengthened shadows of the right sort of people.”
“有人说，一个机构往往是一个人的延长影子……我们在某种程度上致力于投资于那些正确人选的延长影子。”
14. “Part of the reason I’ve been a little more successful than most people is [that] I’m good at destroying my own best-loved ideas. I knew early in life that would be a useful knack and I’ve honed it all these years, so I’m pleased when I can destroy an idea that I’ve worked very hard on over a long period of time. And most people aren’t.”
“我比大多数人更成功的部分原因是[因为]我擅长摧毁自己最喜欢的想法。我早在生活中就知道这是一种有用的技能，并且这些年来我一直在磨练它，所以当我能够摧毁一个我花了很长时间努力工作的想法时，我感到很高兴。而大多数人做不到。”
15. “The nature of capitalism is that all things die — but death is part of the creative process.”
“资本主义的本质是所有事物都会死亡——但死亡是创造的一部分。”
16. “Capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.”
“没有失败的资本主义就像没有地狱的宗教。”
17. “I’ve written my obituary by the way I’ve lived my life. If you want to pay attention to it, that’s alright with me. And if you want to ignore it, that’s okay with me, too. I’ll be dead — what difference will it make.”
“我通过我的生活方式写下了我的讣告。如果你想关注它，我没问题。如果你想忽视它，我也没问题。我会死去——这有什么区别呢。”
18. “I’m optimistic about life. If I can be optimistic when I’m nearly dead, surely the rest of you can handle a little inflation.”
“我对生活持乐观态度。如果我在快要死的时候都能乐观，那么你们其他人肯定也能应对一点通货膨胀。”
19. “There is no way to know enough about a thousand different stocks to be very good at it. If you want to be good, you have to pick a few.”
“没有办法对一千种不同的股票了解得足够多以便做到非常好。如果你想要做得好，你必须选择几种。”
20. “The people who tend to get the best results are these fanatics who just keep searching for the great businesses. And the best of them don’t expect to find ten or twenty or thirty. They find one or two. That’s the right way to do it — all you need are one or two.”
“那些往往能取得最佳结果的人是那些疯狂追求伟大企业的狂热者。他们中的佼佼者并不指望找到十个、二十个或三十个。他们只找到一两个。这才是正确的方法——你只需要一两个。”
21. “What you don’t want to be is like the man who, when they had his funeral, the minister said, ‘Now’s the time for someone to say something nice about the deceased,’ and nobody came forward. He said, ‘Surely, somebody can say something nice about the deceased,’ and nobody came forward. Finally, one man came up and said, ‘Well, his brother was worse.’”
“你不想成为那种人，当他们为他举行葬礼时，牧师说，‘现在是时候让某人说点好话关于已故者了，’但没有人站出来。他说，‘肯定有人可以说点好话关于已故者，’但没有人站出来。最后，一个人站出来说，‘好吧，他的兄弟更糟。’”
22. “You can be disappointed in your political opponent, [but] you don’t have to hate him. After all, you’re probably just as much of a nutcase as he is in some ways.”
“你可以对你的政治对手感到失望，[但]你不必恨他。毕竟，在某些方面，你可能和他一样疯狂。”
23. “The idea of caring that someone is making money faster [than you are] is one of the deadly sins. Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?”
“关心别人赚钱比你快的想法是七宗罪之一。嫉妒是一种非常愚蠢的罪，因为它是唯一一种你根本无法享受的罪。充满了痛苦而没有乐趣。你为什么想要上那辆电车？”
24. “Whenever you think something or someone is ruining your life, it’s [actually] you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating.”
“每当你认为某事或某人正在毁掉你的生活时，其实是你自己。受害者心态是如此令人沮丧。”
25. “Just because it’s trite doesn’t mean it isn’t right. In fact, I like to say, ‘If it’s trite, it’s right.’”
“仅仅因为它陈旧并不意味着它不正确。事实上，我喜欢说，‘如果它陈旧，那就是正确的。’”
26. “In my whole life, I have known no other wise people who didn’t read all the time. None. Zero. You’d be amazed at 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.”
“在我一生中，我从未见过不读书的智者。没有。零。你会惊讶于沃伦读了多少书——以及我读了多少书。我的孩子们嘲笑我。他们觉得我就像一本有几条腿的书。”
27. “If you don’t get … the mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you [will] go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
“如果你不把……初等概率的数学知识纳入你的技能库，那么你将像一个在踢屁股比赛中只有一条腿的人一样度过漫长的生活。”
28. “Competency is a relative concept … What I needed to get ahead was to compete against idiots. And, luckily, there was a large supply.”
“能力是一个相对的概念……我想要取得进步所需要的，是与愚蠢的人竞争。幸运的是，这种人有很多。”
29. “I am a biography nut myself. When you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, but if you go through life making friends with the ‘eminent dead’ who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just giving the basic concepts.”
“我自己是个传记迷。当你试图教授有效的伟大概念时，将它们与发展这些概念的人们的生活和个性联系起来是有帮助的。我认为如果你把亚当·斯密当作朋友，你会更好地学习经济学。这听起来很有趣，但如果你在生活中与那些有正确思想的‘杰出已故者’交朋友，我认为这会让你在生活中更顺利，在教育中也更有效。这比仅仅教授基本概念要好得多。”
30. “Just hold the goddamn stock.”
“就持有这该死的股票。”
Charlie’s estate planning advice for Berkshire shareholders.
查理对伯克希尔股东的遗产规划建议。
31. “Give a whole lot of things a wide berth … Crooks, crazies, egomaniacs, people full of resentment, people full of self-pity, people who feel like victims — there’s a lot of things that aren’t going to work for you. Figure out what they are and then avoid them like the plague.”
“尽量远离很多东西……小偷、疯子、自恋狂、充满怨恨的人、充满自怜的人、感觉自己是受害者的人——有很多东西对你来说是行不通的。找出它们是什么，然后像对待瘟疫一样避开它们。”
32. “The toxic people who are trying to fool you or lie to you — who aren’t reliable in meeting their commitments — the great lesson is [to] get them the hell out of your life. And do it fast.”
“那些试图欺骗你或对你撒谎的有毒人——那些在履行承诺方面不可靠的人——最大的教训就是[要]把他们赶出你的生活。并且要快。”
33. “[Warren and I] have this fundamental idea that the world works better if you make your relationships win-win. And we both learned early that the way to get a good partner was to be a good partner. These are very old-fashioned ideas — and they just worked so fabulously well.”
“[沃伦和我]有一个基本的想法，那就是如果你让你的关系实现双赢，世界运转得会更好。我们都很早就学到，获得一个好伙伴的方式就是成为一个好伙伴。这些都是非常老派的想法——而且它们效果非常好。”
34. “You only have to get rich once. You don’t have to climb this mountain four times. You just have to do it once.”
“你只需要富有一次。你不必爬这座山四次。你只需要做一次。”
35. “A lot of people think that if they have a hundred stocks, they’re investing more professionally than they are if they have four or five. I regard this as insanity.”
“很多人认为，如果他们有一百只股票，他们的投资比只有四五只股票时更专业。我认为这是一种疯狂。”
36. “The wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t. It’s that simple.”
“聪明的人在世界给他们机会时会大举下注。他们在有利的情况下下注很大。而其余时间，他们则不会。就是这么简单。”
37. “Part of the Berkshire secret is that when there’s nothing to do, Warren is very good at doing nothing.”
“伯克希尔的秘密之一是，当没有事情可做时，沃伦非常擅长无所事事。”
38. “All investment is intrinsically damn difficult because obviously good ideas get bid to such [high] prices that they get dangerous. There’s no investment that is so good that you can’t ruin it by raising the price higher and higher. None of them are worth an infinite amount of money.”
“所有投资本质上都是非常困难的，因为显然好的想法会被竞标到如此[高]的价格，以至于变得危险。没有任何投资是如此优秀，以至于你不能通过不断提高价格来毁掉它。它们都不值无限的金钱。”
39. “Warren, think it over and you’ll agree with me — because you’re smart and I’m right.”
“沃伦，考虑一下，你会同意我的观点——因为你聪明，而我是对的。”
What Charlie would say to Warren on the rare times when they disagreed. But, as both men proudly attested, they never once had an argument.
查理在他们罕见意见不合时会对沃伦说的话。但是，正如两位男士自豪地证明的那样，他们从未发生过争吵。
40. “The four closest friends of my youth were highly intelligent, ethical, humorous types … Two are long dead — with alcohol a contributing factor — and the third is a living alcoholic (if you call that living). While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. And, yet, I have yet to meet anyone — in over six decades of life — whose life was worsened by fear and avoidance of such a deceptive pathway to destruction.”
“我年轻时的四个最亲密的朋友都是非常聪明、道德高尚、幽默风趣的人……其中两个已经去世——酒精是一个促成因素——第三个是一个活着的酒鬼（如果你能称之为活着的话）。虽然易感性各不相同，但成瘾可能发生在我们任何人身上，这个过程非常隐蔽，以至于堕落的枷锁轻到感觉不到，直到它们变得太强大而无法打破。然而，在我六十多年的生活中，我还未遇到过一个因为害怕和避免这种通向毁灭的欺骗性道路而生活变得更糟的人。”
41. “Why should I expect my society is always going to be marching upwards [just] because it has for a long time? I believe you [should] adjust to whatever society turns out to be and you do the best you can. That’s all any human being can do — and that’s all I’m going to do.”
“我为什么要期待我的社会总是向上发展[仅仅]因为它已经这样很长时间了？我相信你[应该]适应社会的变化，尽你所能做到最好。这就是任何人能做的——这也是我将要做的。”
42. “The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It’s powerful because it’s so rare.”
“不自欺的精神是你可能拥有的最好的精神之一。它之所以强大，是因为它如此稀有。”
43. “I like people [who can] admit they were complete horses’ asses. I know I’ll perform better if I rub my nose in my mistakes. This is a wonderful trick to learn.”
“我喜欢那些能承认自己完全是个傻瓜的人。我知道如果我正视自己的错误，我的表现会更好。这是一个很棒的技巧。”
44. “Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group — then to hell with them.”
“获取世俗智慧，并相应地调整你的行为。如果你新的行为让你在同龄人中暂时不受欢迎——那就去他们的吧。”
45. “We want to buy something that’s intrinsically a very good business, meaning that an idiot could run it and it would do alright. Then we want that business, which an idiot could run successfully, to have a wonderful person running it. If we have a wonderful business with a wonderful person running it, that really turns us on.”
“我们想买一些本质上非常好的生意，这意味着即使是个傻瓜也能经营得不错。然后我们希望这个傻瓜也能成功经营的生意，有一个出色的人在管理。如果我们有一个出色的生意和一个出色的人在经营，那真的让我们兴奋。”
46. “I had a friend who said, ‘If it won’t stand a little mismanagement, it’s not much of a business.’ We like businesses that can stand a lot of mismanagement — but don’t get it. That’s our formula.”
“我有个朋友说过，‘如果一点管理不善都承受不了，那就不算是个好生意。’我们喜欢那些能承受很多管理不善的生意——但实际上并没有受到管理不善的影响。这就是我们的公式。”
47. “The best way to get what you want in life is to deserve what you want. If you apply that to business, that means you really take care of your customers.”
“在生活中获得你想要的东西的最好方法是值得拥有你想要的东西。如果你把这应用到商业上，这意味着你真的要好好照顾你的客户。”
48. “I’ve patterned my life after [Benjamin] Franklin. I stopped trying to make more money when I had enough. He did the same damn thing. He didn’t try and die with all his money. He gave a lot of it away … I’ve done the same thing.”
“我以[本杰明]富兰克林的生活为榜样。当我有足够的钱时，我就不再试图赚更多的钱。他也做了同样的事情。他没有试图带着所有的钱去死。他把很多钱都捐了出去……我也做了同样的事情。”
49. “It would be nice if I were Mother Teresa and did something I didn’t like doing because I am a noble soul, but my life is organized so that — time after time — what works for my pocketbook [also] works for every moral teaching that I’ve been taught.”
“如果我像特蕾莎修女那样，因为我是一个高尚的灵魂而去做一些我不喜欢做的事情，那当然很好，但我的生活安排得如此巧妙——一次又一次，既符合我的经济利益，也符合我所接受的所有道德教义。”
50. “I’ve known a lot of roguish people that made a fair amount of money — and they started giving a little money [to charitable causes] to show off. Twenty years later, they’re actually real philanthropists. You become what you pretend to be, to some considerable extent.”
“我认识很多狡猾的人，他们赚了不少钱——起初他们只是为了炫耀而给一些钱[用于慈善事业]。二十年后，他们实际上成了真正的慈善家。你在很大程度上会变成你所假装的样子。”
51. “You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. All of these simple rules work so well to make your life better.”
“你没有太多的嫉妒，没有太多的怨恨，不超支你的收入，尽管有困难仍然保持乐观，和可靠的人交往，做你该做的事情。所有这些简单的规则都能很好地改善你的生活。”
52. “The most famous composer in the world was utterly miserable most of the time … because he always overspent his income. This was Mozart. If Mozart couldn’t get by with this kind of asinine conduct, I don’t think you should try.”
“世界上最著名的作曲家大部分时间都非常痛苦……因为他总是超支。这就是莫扎特。如果莫扎特都无法通过这种愚蠢的行为生存下去，我认为你也不应该尝试。”
53. “We’ve had enough good sense, when something is working very well, to keep doing it. I’d say we’re demonstrating what might be called the fundamental algorithm of life — repeat what works.”
“我们有足够的智慧，当某件事情运作得很好时，就继续这样做。我想我们正在展示可以称之为生活基本算法的东西——重复有效的做法。”
Charlie often praised Lee Kuan Yew’s work in Singapore as an exemplar to other political leaders around the world. In particular, he appreciated the prime minister’s simple mantra: “Figure out what works and do it.”
查理常常赞扬李光耀在新加坡的工作，认为这是世界其他政治领导人的榜样。特别是，他欣赏这位总理简单的座右铭：“找出有效的方法并去做。”
54. “It’s not that much fun to buy a business where you really hope this sucker liquidates before it goes broke.”
“买一个你真的希望这个家伙在破产之前就清算掉的生意并没有那么有趣。”
55. “I’m no good at exits. I don’t like even looking for exits. I’m looking for holds.”
“我不擅长寻找出口。我甚至不喜欢寻找出口。我在寻找支撑。”
56. “All good investing is value investing. It’s just that some people look for value in strong companies and some look for value in weak companies — but every value investor tries to get more value than he pays for.”
“所有好的投资都是价值投资。只是有些人寻找强公司中的价值，而有些人则在弱公司中寻找价值——但每个价值投资者都试图获得比他支付的更多的价值。”
57. “I didn’t get rich by buying stocks at a high price-earnings multiple in the midst of crazy speculative booms — and I’m not going to change.”
“我并不是通过在疯狂的投机热潮中以高市盈率买入股票致富的——而且我也不会改变这一点。”
58. “You don’t need perfect. If you’re 96% sure, that’s all you’re entitled to in many cases. I see these people doing due diligence and the weaker they are as thinkers, the more due diligence they do. It’s a way of allaying inner insecurity — but it doesn’t work.”
“你不需要完美。如果你有 96%的把握，在很多情况下这就是你应得的。我看到这些人进行尽职调查，他们的思维能力越弱，尽职调查做得越多。这是一种缓解内心不安的方式——但这并没有用。”
59. “Playing poker in the army and as a young lawyer honed my business skills. What you have to learn is to fold early when the odds are against you — or, if you have a big edge, to back it heavily. You don’t get a big edge very often, so seize it when it does come.”
“在军队和作为年轻律师时打扑克磨练了我的商业技能。你必须学会在形势对你不利时尽早放弃——或者，如果你有很大的优势，就要重注。你不会经常获得很大的优势，所以当它出现时要抓住机会。”
60. “It’s kind of fun to sit there and out-think people who are way smarter than you are because you’ve trained yourself to be more objective and more multidisciplinary. Furthermore, there is a lot of money in it — as I can testify from my own personal experience.”
“坐在那里超越那些比你聪明得多的人，确实有点乐趣，因为你已经训练自己变得更加客观和多学科。此外，这里面有很多钱——我可以根据自己的个人经验证明这一点。”
61. “Knowing the edge of your circle of competence is one of the most difficult things for a human being to do. Knowing what you don’t know is much more useful in life and business than being brilliant.”
“了解你能力圈的边界是人类最难做到的事情之一。知道你不知道的东西在生活和商业中比聪明更有用。”
62. “People chronically mis-appraise the limits of their own knowledge. That’s one of the most basic parts of human nature.”
“人们常常错误地评估自己知识的局限性。这是人性最基本的部分之一。”
63. “It’s much better to think you’re ignorant. If people weren’t so often wrong, we wouldn’t be so rich.”
“认为自己无知要好得多。如果人们不那么常常犯错，我们就不会这么富有。”
64. “If you stay rational yourself, the stupidity of the world helps you.”
“如果你保持理智，世界的愚蠢会帮助你。”
65. “Most people probably shouldn’t do anything other than have index funds … That is a perfectly rational thing to do for somebody who doesn’t want to think much about it and has no reason to think he has any advantage as a stock picker. Why should he try and pick his own stocks? He doesn’t design his own electric motors and his egg beater.
“大多数人可能不应该做其他事情，除了投资指数基金……对于那些不想多思考并且没有理由认为自己在选股方面有任何优势的人来说，这是一种完全合理的做法。他为什么要尝试自己选股呢？他不会自己设计电动马达和打蛋器。”
66. “When you borrow a man’s car, you always return it with a full tank of gas.”
“当你借一个人的车时，你总是要把油箱加满后再还给他。”
67. “I don’t think we’ve got any rules about what we do at Berkshire. If it makes sense at the time in a rough kind of way, we do it. That’s our system.”
“我认为我们在伯克希尔没有任何规则。如果在当时以一种粗略的方式看起来合理，我们就会去做。这就是我们的系统。”
68. “Understanding both the power of compound return and the difficulty getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.”
“理解复利的力量和获得复利的困难是理解许多事物的核心。”
69. “If you soldier through, you can get through almost anything. It’s your only option. You can’t bring back the dead. You can’t cure the dying child. You can’t do all kinds of things. You have to soldier through it. If you have to walk through the streets, crying for a few hours a day as part of the soldiering through — go ahead and cry away. But you can’t quit. You can cry, but you can’t quit.”
“如果你坚持下去，你几乎可以克服任何事情。这是你唯一的选择。你无法让死者复生。你无法治愈垂死的孩子。你无法做各种事情。你必须坚持下去。如果你必须在街上走，哭泣几个小时作为坚持的一部分——那就尽情哭吧。但你不能放弃。你可以哭，但你不能放弃。”
70. “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”
“我想知道的就是我将在哪里死去，这样我就永远不会去那里。”
Charlie loved to solve problems through inversion. Or, in other words, he flipped the problem upside down and reached the solution in reverse. When tasked with charting safe flight paths for Air Force pilots during World War II, he asked himself what he would do if he were trying to get those pilots killed — and then studiously avoided those potential missteps. Perhaps the most famous of Charlie’s many mental models.
查理喜欢通过反转来解决问题。换句话说，他把问题颠倒过来，从反方向找到解决方案。在第二次世界大战期间，当被要求为空军飞行员绘制安全飞行路线时，他问自己如果想让那些飞行员遇难会怎么做——然后认真避免那些潜在的失误。这可能是查理众多思维模型中最著名的一个。
71. “I don’t use formal projections. I don’t let people do them for me because I don’t like throwing up on the desk.”
“我不使用正式的预测。我不让别人为我做这些，因为我不喜欢在桌子上呕吐。”
72. “The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it’s going to kill you.”
“微观经济学的伟大教训是区分技术何时会帮助你，何时会害死你。”
73. “I did not intend to get rich. I wanted to get independent. I just overshot.”
“我并不打算致富。我想要独立。我只是走得太远了。”
74. “There are a lot of cognitive biases that are very significant. One is the constant tendency to overrate your own intelligence and skills in deciding what to do and what not to do.”
“有很多认知偏差是非常重要的。其中之一是人们在决定做什么和不做什么时，常常倾向于高估自己的智力和技能。”
75. “I didn’t mind at all playing second fiddle to Warren. Ordinarily, everywhere I go I am very dominant, but when somebody is better, I’m willing to play second fiddle. It’s just that I was seldom in that position — except with Warren.”
“我一点也不介意在沃伦面前充当配角。通常情况下，无论我走到哪里，我都很有主导性，但当有人更优秀时，我愿意充当配角。只是我很少处于那种位置——除了和沃伦在一起。”
76. “We have three baskets for investing: yes, no, and too tough to understand.”
“我们有三个投资篮子：是，不是，以及太难理解。”
77. “Take a simple idea — and take it seriously.”
“把一个简单的想法——认真对待。”
78. “Acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.”
“承认你不知道的事情是智慧的开端。”
79. “You can call [Bitcoin] a store of wealth. I call it a store of delusion.”
“你可以称[比特币]为财富的储存。我称它为幻觉的储存。”
Another withering dismissal of cryptocurrency — joining previous entrants like “rat poison”, “worthless artificial gold”, and “scumball activity”.
另一种对加密货币的冷嘲热讽——与之前的“老鼠毒药”、“毫无价值的人工黄金”和“卑鄙活动”等说法并列。
80. “My theory, from the very beginning, was [to] eliminate the most conventional asininity. If I could just do that, I’d have an advantage over most people. So I collected asininities as things I should avoid.”
“我的理论，从一开始，就是要消除最常见的愚蠢。如果我能做到这一点，我就会比大多数人有优势。因此，我把愚蠢当作我应该避免的事情。”
81. “The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust … Just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.”
“文明能够达到的最高形式是一个无缝的应得信任网络……完全可靠的人彼此正确信任。”
82. Charlie was once asked to whom he felt most grateful: “My wife’s first husband. I had the ungrudging love of this magnificent woman for 60 years simply by being a somewhat less awful husband than he was.”
查理曾被问到他最感激谁：“我妻子的第一任丈夫。通过做一个稍微不那么糟糕的丈夫，我得到了这位伟大女性 60 年的无私爱。”
83. “Of all of the arts, I think architecture is the best because it gives you not only the pleasant views and all that, but it makes the civilization work better. It’s the space in which [people] live. And, if it’s organized intelligently, it really helps them.”
“在所有艺术中，我认为建筑是最好的，因为它不仅提供愉悦的景观，还能使文明运作得更好。这是人们生活的空间。如果它被智能地组织起来，确实会对他们有所帮助。”
84. “[Warren and I] realized that some company that was selling at 2-3x book value could still be a hell of a bargain because of momentums implicit in its position, sometimes combined with an unusual managerial skill plainly present in some individual — or some system.”
“[沃伦和我]意识到，一家公司即使以2-3倍的账面价值出售，仍然可能是一个极好的便宜货，因为它所处的地位中隐含的动力，有时还结合了某个个人或某个系统中明显存在的非凡管理才能。”
85. “Trust first, ability second.”
“信任第一，能力第二。”
Charlie’s fool-proof hiring philosophy.
查理的万无一失的招聘理念。
86. “I think you would understand any presentation using the word EBITDA [better] if, every time you saw that word, you just substituted the phrase ‘bullshit earnings’.”
“我认为每次你看到 EBITDA 这个词时，如果你把它替换成‘胡说八道的收益’，你会更好地理解任何使用这个词的演示。”
87. “Having a huge proportion of the young and brilliant people all going into wealth management is a crazy development in terms of its natural consequences for American civilization. We don’t need as many wealth managers as we have.”
“大量年轻而优秀的人都进入财富管理行业，这在其对美国文明的自然影响方面是一个疯狂的发展。我们不需要这么多财富管理者。”
88. “One of the reasons that I was as economically successful as I was is because I read so damn much all my life — starting when I was six years old. I don’t know how to get smart without reading a lot.”
“我之所以在经济上取得如此成功的原因之一是因为我一生中读了很多书——从六岁开始。我不知道不大量阅读怎么能变聪明。”
89. “[Seinfeld] is not really about nothing. It’s about the humor of life being used to make life endurable. By kidding one another … they are amusing us all.”
“《宋飞正传》并不真的是关于无的。它是关于生活的幽默被用来让生活变得可忍受。通过互相开玩笑……他们让我们都感到愉快。”
I’m a huge Seinfeld fan, so I’m throwing this in here. But, in all seriousness, this is an extremely astute comment. I’m a little bummed that we’ve been missing out on Charlie’s TV show reviews all of these years…
我非常喜欢《宋飞正传》，所以我把这个放在这里。但是，认真说，这真是一个非常敏锐的评论。我有点失落，这些年来我们一直错过查理的电视节目评论……
90. “Everybody engaged in complicated work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in order with somebody else is a very useful thing.”
“每个从事复杂工作的人员都需要同事。与他人一起整理思路的纪律是一件非常有用的事情。”
91. “You know this cliche that opposites attract? Well, opposites don’t attract. Psychological experiments prove that it’s people who are alike that are attracted to each other. Our minds work in very much the same way.”
“你知道这个陈词滥调，异性相吸吗？其实，异性并不相吸。心理实验证明，吸引彼此的是相似的人。我们的思维方式非常相似。”
92. “A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. That is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success.”
“许多智商高的人都是糟糕的投资者，因为他们的性格很糟糕。这就是为什么我们说拥有某种性格比智力更重要。你需要控制原始的非理性情绪。你需要耐心和纪律，以及在遭受损失和逆境时不发疯的能力。你需要有能力不被极端的成功所驱使而疯狂。”
93. “If you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century, you’re not fit to be a common shareholder and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get.”
“如果你不愿意在一个世纪内经历两到三次市场价格下降 50%时保持平静，那么你不适合成为普通股东，你也配得上你将得到的平庸结果。”
94. “It’s not the bad ideas that do you in — it’s the good ideas. You may say, ‘That can’t be so. That’s paradoxical.’ What [Ben Graham] meant was that if a thing is bad idea, it’s hard to overdo [it]. But where there is a good idea with a core of essential and important truth, you can’t ignore it. And, then, it’s so easy to overdo it. So the good ideas are a wonderful way to suffer terribly if you overdo them.”
“让你陷入困境的不是坏主意，而是好主意。你可能会说，‘这不可能。这是矛盾的。’[本·格雷厄姆]的意思是，如果一个主意是坏主意，很难过度使用它。但如果有一个核心是基本和重要真理的好主意，你就无法忽视它。而且，过度使用它是如此简单。因此，好主意如果过度使用，会让你遭受可怕的痛苦。”
95. “The best source of new work is the work on your desk.”
“新工作的最佳来源是你桌子上的工作。”
In other words: If you buckle down and do good work, your boss (or clients) will notice and you’ll be rewarded with more responsibility and more important work.
换句话说：如果你努力工作，表现出色，你的老板（或客户）会注意到，你将获得更多的责任和更重要的工作。
96. “An example of a really responsible system is the system the Romans used when they built an arch. The guy who created the arch stood under it as the scaffolding was removed. It’s like packing your own parachute.”
“一个真正负责任的系统的例子是罗马人在建造拱门时使用的系统。创建拱门的人在脚手架被拆除时站在拱门下。这就像自己打包降落伞。”
97. “It’s waiting that helps you as an investor — and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.”
“等待对你作为投资者是有帮助的——而很多人就是无法忍受等待。如果你没有延迟满足的基因，你必须非常努力地去克服这一点。”
98. “I paid no attention to the territorial boundaries of academic disciplines and I just grabbed all of the big ideas that I could.”
“我没有关注学科的领土界限，只是抓住了我能找到的所有重要思想。”
99. Charlie recently told the Wall Street Journal that he hoped his epitaph will read: “I tried to be useful.”
查理最近告诉 《华尔街日报》，他希望他的墓志铭写着：“我努力做一个有用的人。”
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