As I mention in another post, Warren Buffett has often lauded Charlie Munger's unique ability to sift through everything irrelevant to an issue and see it clearly before anyone else has more than begun to wrap their mind around the terrain at hand. According to Buffett, Munger has "the best 30-second mind in the world. He goes from A to Z in one move. He sees the essence of everything before you even finish the sentence."
A fine article by Chris Brown in Grantland analyzing the top-rated quarterbacks in the 2014 NFL draft spurred some thinking about Munger's ability to quickly, accurately, and confidently get to the heart of the matter and execute (often under duress--though not usually a duress imposed by Jadaveon Clowney or any other 260 pound human who runs a 4.5 40-yard dash).
For Brown, who views the quarterback--all spectacularly talented; all somehow flawed--as a sort of Rorschach test: what the viewer perceives in each of the top three (Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater, and Johnny Manziel) says more about the evaluator rather than the quarterback. Brown gets to the heart of the matter in trying to determine which player is likely to have the best career, a notoriously difficult task, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, this way: “The single trait that separates great quarterbacks from good quarterbacks is the ability to make the great, spontaneous decision, especially at a crucial time,” wrote Walsh. “The play that was called has broken down and 22 players are moving in almost unpredictable directions all over the field. This is where the great quarterback uses his experience, vision, mobility and what we will call spontaneous genius. He makes something good happen.”
Spontaneous genius is a great term. It's also likely dangerous to any investor trying to emulate it. (I don't imagine Brett Favre would attract too much money as a portfolio manager). Munger certainly wouldn't try to make such complicated decisions so quickly. Still, the ability Brown sees in Manziel, I think, can tell us a lot about (or at least allow us to appreciate) Munger's ability to make really good decisions when evaluating really complex systems as Farnam Street's Shane Phillips articulates them.
Watching Munger isn't nearly as exciting as watching Johnny Football (as the clip below indicates), but paying attention to how Munger achieves his excellence is probably safer, more replicable for most of us, and will probably translate better to what most of us have to do every day.
A fine article by Chris Brown in Grantland analyzing the top-rated quarterbacks in the 2014 NFL draft spurred some thinking about Munger's ability to quickly, accurately, and confidently get to the heart of the matter and execute (often under duress--though not usually a duress imposed by Jadaveon Clowney or any other 260 pound human who runs a 4.5 40-yard dash).
For Brown, who views the quarterback--all spectacularly talented; all somehow flawed--as a sort of Rorschach test: what the viewer perceives in each of the top three (Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater, and Johnny Manziel) says more about the evaluator rather than the quarterback. Brown gets to the heart of the matter in trying to determine which player is likely to have the best career, a notoriously difficult task, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, this way: “The single trait that separates great quarterbacks from good quarterbacks is the ability to make the great, spontaneous decision, especially at a crucial time,” wrote Walsh. “The play that was called has broken down and 22 players are moving in almost unpredictable directions all over the field. This is where the great quarterback uses his experience, vision, mobility and what we will call spontaneous genius. He makes something good happen.”
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| Johnny Football. Spontaneous Genius? |
Spontaneous genius is a great term. It's also likely dangerous to any investor trying to emulate it. (I don't imagine Brett Favre would attract too much money as a portfolio manager). Munger certainly wouldn't try to make such complicated decisions so quickly. Still, the ability Brown sees in Manziel, I think, can tell us a lot about (or at least allow us to appreciate) Munger's ability to make really good decisions when evaluating really complex systems as Farnam Street's Shane Phillips articulates them.
Watching Munger isn't nearly as exciting as watching Johnny Football (as the clip below indicates), but paying attention to how Munger achieves his excellence is probably safer, more replicable for most of us, and will probably translate better to what most of us have to do every day.
Munger is famous for articulating a bunch of seemingly simple ideas that are, when you get down to them, quite difficult to apply. He advocates for developing a latticework of mental models to understand experience; a four filter process for running potential investments through, etc.
And his speeches and writing have offered a lot of insight into how that works. But most fall short of showing us much in terms of using that latticework. As Michael Oakeshott might put it, his writing goes a long way toward helping us understand the technical component of Munger's knowledge, but not so much for the practical aspects.
Oakeshott writes, “Doing anything both depends upon and exhibits knowing how to do it. And though part (but never the whole) of knowing how to do it can subsequently be reduced to knowledge in the form of propositions (and possibly to ends, rules and principles), these propositions are neither the spring of the activity nor are they in any direct sense regulative of the activity.”
Oakeshott thinks that anyone, whether a carpenter, scientist, painter, judge, cook (or, yes, NFL quarterback) “in the ordinary conduct of his life, and in his relations with other people and with the world around him is a knowledge, not of certain propositions about themselves, their tools (including mental models), and the materials in which they work, but a knowledge of how to decide certain questions.” This knowledge, he goes on to argue, is “the condition of the exercise of the power to construct such propositions.” Looking for Munger’s writing or words to provide actual answers to concrete situations, in other words, is folly, because, as Oakeshott argues in another context, “a received philosophy is already a dead one.” That's why the exchanges between Jon Gruden and quarterbacks are so interesting: what a quarterback knows tells part of the story, but how he applies it is something else entirely.
Oakeshott, in a case he could well make about football as much as language, argues, “‘Good’ English is not something that exists in advance of how English is written (that is to say English literature); and the knowledge that such and such is a sloppy, ambiguous construction, or is ‘bad grammar’, is not something that can be known independently and in advance of knowing how to write the language.”
Chris Brown concludes his article by writing, "Bortles, Bridgewater, and Manziel can all play, but I’d call only one a “spontaneous genius.” Johnny Football tops my board … but maybe that says more about me than it does about him."
I do think it says a lot about Brown. Why take Manziel over Bridgewater? In Oakeshott's words, "Not to detect a man's style is to have missed three-quarters of the meaning of his utterances." Or his quarterbacking. It's pretty hard to miss Manziel's style.
Chris Brown concludes his article by writing, "Bortles, Bridgewater, and Manziel can all play, but I’d call only one a “spontaneous genius.” Johnny Football tops my board … but maybe that says more about me than it does about him."
I do think it says a lot about Brown. Why take Manziel over Bridgewater? In Oakeshott's words, "Not to detect a man's style is to have missed three-quarters of the meaning of his utterances." Or his quarterbacking. It's pretty hard to miss Manziel's style.
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