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| Charlie Munger |
Charlie Munger + Greg Glassman = a sane mind in a sound body.
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| Coach Greg Glassman |
Greg Glassman revolutionized fitness by providing a training program that prepares people for any physical contingency. His method uses constantly varied, functional movements performed at high intensity.
CrossFit is very simple. It's about general physical preparedness. CrossFit is defined by constantly varied, functional movement performed at high intensity.
Any person following that prescription is doing CrossFit.
CrossFit's results are staggering. And often counter-intuitive. Its underlying premise is that it's impossible to be physically fit without being able to perform the physical tasks that living requires. Because life's demands are so varied and unpredictable, our training must be also.
Charlie Munger’s ideas are to the mind as Glassman’s are to the body. Munger’s ‘mental models’ lead to worldly wisdom and result in general intellectual preparedness. (His idea of mental models comes from a talk that can be found here: http://ycombinator.com/munger.html).
Poor Charlie's Almanack: Wit & Wisdom of Charlie Munger
Munger thinks anyone prepared for the unknown and unknowable life throws at them has something he calls "elementary, worldly wisdom." And this kind of wisdom means having "models in your head." Those models are culled from experience, and take the biggest insights from different disciplines.
"80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight," Munger argues in a strikingly similar vein to CrossFit's nine foundational movements.
"So let's briefly review what kind of models and techniques constitute this basic knowledge that everybody has to have," Munger said.
"First there's mathematics. Obviously, you've got to be able to handle numbers and quantities—basic arithmetic. And the great useful model, after compound interest, is the elementary math of permutations and combinations...It's very simple algebra. It was all worked out in the course of about one year between Pascal and Fermat. They worked it out casually in a series of letters.
“It's not that hard to learn. What is hard is to get so you use it routinely almost everyday of your life. The Fermat/Pascal system is dramatically consonant with the way that the world works. And it's fundamental truth. So you simply have to have the technique."
We'll consider what to do with these models in an upcoming post.
