This year, as with every rotation around the sun, the world lost many lights. Jimmy Buffett and the other Buffett’s long-time business partner Charlie Munger to name just a few. Munger was a fascinating man, a contrarian financier, who maintained an admirable curiosity and positively puritanical work schedule right up to the very end of his 99 years.
Like most successful men unafraid to dole out advice and share positive ideas, Munger was despised by some. He could so easily be dismissed in some quarters as an icon of white male privilege. And yet, like every person, he was so much more than a list of external features.
No matter how excellent and driven, people can be sidelined by prejudice, ill health, untoward circumstances, or the dumb injustice of being alive in this pilgrim world. At the age of 7, Munger and a little girl were charged by a rabid dog. While Munger walked away uninjured, the girl was badly mauled, succumbed to her injuries, and died. When someone from the Wall Street Journal asked him, “What do you think of people who attribute their success solely to their own brilliance and hard work?
The reporter recounts: “’I think that’s nonsense,’ Munger snapped, then told his story, which I can’t recall him ever publicly recounting. ‘That damn dog wasn’t 3 inches from me,’ he said. ‘All my life I’ve wondered: Why did it bite her instead of me? It was sheer luck that I lived and she died.’”
If it’s all just luck, why try at anything? Because there is also, demonstrably, agency. In the amalgam of the two (luck and agency) growth and success are possible. As much as Munger may be disliked for his extravagant, characteristically excessive, and quintessentially American successes, it cannot be called inevitable.
What Munger advised, and lived out, up until the end was investing with a long-term horizon. Even in his 90s, Munger did not wind things down. He continued to invest with a view to the long horizon. And that is how anyone makes good decisions. Why floss your teeth if the world is supposed to end tomorrow? Why have children if global warming is inevitable? Why bother with the expense and trouble of tidying and preparing a meal when all will only have to be done again the next day? In the grand scheme of things, the little things sometimes do matter after all.
Investing isn’t all that important, but a disciplined investor demonstrates the truths of luck and virtue combined. Ultimately, all those gains will amount to nothing, and it will be the spiritual realities chosen that define us; those are the ultimate long-term decisions. In the fullness of time, as Alice Von Hildebrand notes, “all accomplishments of men will be destroyed at the end of time, everything will be burned, but every woman who has given birth to a child came to eternity.”
There’s more to parce there, but suffice it to say we don’t know if Jimmy Buffett found cheeseburgers in paradise, but we can pray.
