Soldiering Through Life

"The dumbest thing you can ever do in life is to feel like a victim."

Charlie Munger was not one to mince words.

His willingness to deliver harsh truths made him an irreplaceable fount of wisdom for anyone strong enough to take onboard his (often) blunt advice.

It also made him eminently quotable.

While on vacation last month, I posted one such quote from Charlie on Twitter/X that implored people to avoid a victim mentality.

Some people just naturally complain and other people just naturally put their head down and soldier through it. Warren and I believe in just soldiering through it without too much fuss. I have the theory that the dumbest thing you can ever do in life is to feel like a victim. Any politician that makes people feel like victims, I automatically dislike. I never saw any good come [from] feeling like a victim. Even if you are a victim, I think it’s a mistake.

Seems like indisputably good advice to me.

And most people agreed. This tweet, at last check, had racked up over 875,000 views along with retweets from the likes of Mark Cuban and Paul Graham. I don’t know if that officially qualifies as “going viral” — but it’s probably the closest I’ll ever come.

This Munger-ism clearly struck a chord with a lot of people.

But it also struck a nerve with others.

Most of the criticism ran along the same lines: What does a billionaire know about being a victim?

Honestly, that objection leaves me pretty cold. Not only is it irrelevant — good advice is good advice, no matter the source — but it’s also factually incorrect to boot.

Some aspects of Charlie Munger’s life might lend the impression of effortless (and painless) success. Like getting into Harvard Law School without even graduating from college or teaming up with Warren Buffett to build Berkshire Hathaway into one of the biggest companies in the world.

But that’s only part of the story.

Tallying up personal tragedy in an effort to prove that one person had it worse than someone else is a mug’s game. But I’m perfectly comfortable admitting that Charlie faced more loss and misery than most. Certainly more than I ever wish to face myself.

The reason that so many people assume that Charlie Munger led a completely charmed life is that he rarely, if ever, complained about this stuff.

He refused to consider himself a victim — even after the worst loss that anyone could imagine — and instead chose to soldier on through life.

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Here a few of the more notable setbacks that Charlie Munger suffered during his life:

✨ In 1953, Charlie’s first wife divorced him — leaving the young lawyer devastated and penniless. “He lost everything in the divorce,” his daughter Molly told Munger biographer Janet Lowe.

Charlie moved out of the family home and took up residence in “dreadful bachelor digs at the University Club”. Nevertheless, he poured all of his energy (and remaining money) into giving his children as normal a childhood as possible with regular outings to the zoo.

✨ Two short years later, Charlie’s 9-year-old son Teddy passed away from leukemia. In the 1950s, this was a disease that afforded the afflicted (and their families) no hope. The diagnosis itself was a death sentence.

Charlie was scarcely 30 and he already faced a failed marriage, a dying child, and an uncertain financial future. Not exactly a throne of privilege.

“When his son was in the [hospital] bed and slowly dying, he’d go in and hold him for a while, then go out walking the streets of Pasadena crying,” said Rick Guerin.

Teddy bravely battled the disease for about a year before passing away in 1955. By the end, Charlie’s weight had sunk 10-15 pounds below normal — which reminded him that he must soldier on for the sake of his other children.

“You should never, when facing some unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase to two or three through your failure of will,” he told Lowe years later.

Tragedy can compound, too, if you let it.

✨ Even after Charlie began ascending the rungs of business stardom, he received a painful reminder about those things in life — like health — that money cannot buy.

The enduring image of Charlie Munger is as the laconic partner of Warren Buffett, peering out at the Berkshire crowd through Coke bottle glasses.

But he was not always that way.

Charlie didn’t even wear glasses until a failed cataracts surgery in 1978 left him on the verge of blindness. His doctor, unbeknownst to him, opted for a riskier procedure that he knew better than the cutting-edge technique preferred by most of his contemporaries. The older method came with double the complication rate of the newer one — and that’s exactly what happened.

An epithelial downgrowth led to the (painful) removal of one of Charlie’s eyes — and raised serious questions about whether he would eventually lose his sight entirely.

No one can say for sure, but this surgical complication almost certainly would not have happened if his doctor had been more knowledgeable and better prepared.

Charlie, though, refused to cast himself as the victim — blaming himself, not his doctor, for the whole mess. “I made the mistake,” he said. “The fault was mine.”

A Solzhenitsyn-esque response to a terrible situation.

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Fittingly, Charlie Munger touched on this very subject in his final televised interview.

“Everybody struggles,” he told Becky Quick. “The iron rule of life is that everybody struggles.”

But he also offered a hopeful solution.

“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, go ahead and cry away. You can cry — but you can’t quit.”

In a way, I can understand why most people view Charlie Munger as a run-of-the-mill billionaire. He did not make it easy to peer beneath the steely exterior and see the personal struggles and tragedies that shaped his life.

But that’s because he never made those painful episodes the centerpiece of his personality. He refused to wallow in these moments of misery and, instead, channeled his energy in a positive direction — which, in turn, made him a role model and hero for millions of people all over the world.

Some people break under the strains of tragedy. Others, like Charlie Munger, choose to put their heads down and soldier through it.