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Curiosity outlasts comfort
Two kinds of drive
Two parents showed two kinds of drive. The mother, a successful entrepreneur, worked relentlessly, and once she reached a certain material wealth she was happy and stopped looking for more. The father had less of that work ethic and pursued his curiosities and his love of learning, and he was driven in a way captured by a Korean meme: da, the Korean word for more, repeated as da, da, da.
A mad scientist's life
He would have been a perfectly happy mad scientist or professor, learning about everything, driven by curiosity and not by money, always building relationships. Many people at his funeral told stories about how he had affected their lives, and some said his father was their best friend.
Collecting wisdom
A drive that stops at comfort doesn't go very far. A person needs a work ethic in the beginning, and then a love for something, whether learning, investing, or a cause worth a life's devotion, that serves something bigger than the self. The father was a hoarder of knowledge, and Buffett and Munger are collectors too, since there is a joy in collecting stocks, stamps, coins, or bits of wisdom.
Why does money stop motivating people?
Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described the hedonic treadmill in a 1971 essay, arguing that people adapt to improved circumstances and return to a baseline level of happiness. Edward Deci's 1971 experiment with a puzzle found that people paid for solving it spent less free time on it afterward than people who were not paid. Deci and Richard Ryan later built self-determination theory around the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Their work finds that curiosity and a sense of purpose sustain effort longer than rewards alone.
What did Munger mean by a latticework of models?
In a 1994 talk at the University of Southern California, Charlie Munger said that people should hang their experience on a latticework of mental models from many disciplines. He drew on psychology, physics, economics, and biology. He argued that someone with only one model sees every problem through it. Munger spent decades collecting these models, which he called elementary worldly wisdom.
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