Mobility and Munger

Munger and Mobility.

No, not upward mobility or how to get rich. But Kelly Starrett's recent comments on RadioWest made me think about Charlie Munger. And how we can better understand his insights, especially into human judgement and psychology.

Starrett's insight, "We need to stop focusing on pain to know if we're in a good position and functioning well as a human body," calls to mind Munger's attempt to develop a system to understand human misjudgment. In this talk he said, "I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgement. And Lord knows I've created a good bit of it. I don't think I've created my full statistical share. And one of the reasons was that I tried to do something about the terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with."



Partly by casual reading and partly by personal experience. But Munger makes pretty clear that the personal experience part caused him to take some lumps. What Munger, I think, was really trying to do was to avoid the pain that comes with forgetting the maxim, "Experience keeps a dear school, but it's a fool who will learn by no other."

CrossFit, like life, will be full of pain. And mistakes. As Munger has argued, "“I don’t want you to think we have any way of learning or behaving so you won’t make mistakes." Munger's practice, despite the mistakes, looks a lot like what Starrett advises, wherever possible, he figured out whether he was in a good position and functioning well mostly without having to be told by the pain that results from stupid decisions. Just as it does from poor physical movement.

Helped along by Robert Cialdini's book Influence, Munger developed a system. He filled in a lot of holes in the 'crude' system he developed.



Applying Starett's insight to Munger, we can get to the point--both intellectually and physically--when we “learn to make fewer mistakes than other people- and how to fix [our] mistakes faster when [we] do make them.” Munger's thought, especially in his admonition that Harvard University should be more like a pilot school and employ a rigorous checklist system, asks that we approach complex analytical situations by reducing variables.

Compare what you do, if you use Munger's 'mental models' to what Kelly Starrett has called the key to getting his athletes to function well--and pain free--in demanding and varied athletic environments: "You want the same set up, the same organization so that you can minimize variability."



Sounds a lot like Munger's hero Ben Franklin's argument that it's easier to prevent bad habits than it is to break them.