Graduation
I didn’t have a beer or 12 after finishing the School of Pipsology last Monday, January 15. 
I did celebrate by having my own graduation ceremony at home. 
I gave myself my diploma:
That’s about a thousand pages of notes I wrote from the School of Pipsology.
I watched the commencement speech by Charlie Munger on YouTube and took notes for fun.
These are the core ideas that helped him to be happy and successful in life:
Get what you want by deserving what you want. Deliver something valuable that people will pay you for. People who have this ethos win money and respect.
There is no love like admiration-based love.
Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty, not something you do just to advance in life. This means lifelong learning. Nothing served him better in life than continuous learning. What got Berkshire through one decade wouldn’t get them through another decade if Warren Buffett wasn’t a learning machine.
Learn the big ideas in many disciplines and apply them. It’s fun and it made Charlie Munger rich. The drawback is that you can know more than experts and it can offend them if you share your knowledge.
Have a multidisciplinary attitude. Cicero said, “a man who doesn’t know what happened before he was born goes through life like a child.” Learn these ideas in such a way that they are a mental lattice in your head, and you can use them every day in your life.
“I wanna know where I’m gonna die so I won’t go there.” Solve problems with inversion. Look for the things that go wrong and avoid them. What will fail in life? Sloth and being unreliable. Avoid sloth and being unreliable.
Avoid extreme ideology of any kind. You can ruin your mind with extreme ideology. “I’m not entitled to give an opinion of any subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are supporting the other position.”
Be aware of your own self-serving bias as well as the self-serving bias of others. Don’t overspend income even if you are entitled to do so. Envy, resentment, revenge, self-pity are disastrous. Self-pity is a ridiculous way to behave. Get out of yourself. The tendency to serve yourself is foolish. Allow for the self-serving bias of others. Appeal to their interest and not to reason.
Don’t be in a system with perverse incentives. Avoid perverse associations. Don’t work with someone you don’t admire and don’t like.
Maintain objectivity. Pay special attention to disconfirming evidence for ideas you are attached to. Use mental checklist routines to avoid errors.
Be non-egalitarian. Get the best people to do the most important things and don’t let unqualified people have important roles and responsibilities.
Intense interest in a subject is indispensable to excel in it.
Have a lot of assadoity. Sit on your ass and do it.
This world we live in isn’t the highest form civilization can reach. The highest form is a seamless web of deserved trust, not much procedure just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.
Go through life anticipating trouble. Life has terrible, unfair blows. Some recover. Some don’t. Every misfortune is an opportunity to behave well and learn something. Use the terrible blow in a constructive way. Ponder the life of this man and his epitaph: “Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favored by the Gods.”
Holy moly! It took me two years to get here, but those two years were just the first few baby steps in my journey to become a trader. The battle has barely begun.
I’m grateful to babypips and the community for helping me get on this path of endless learning, improvement, and discovery.
"The most important thing you can invest in as a forex trader is your TIME! Every single trading day is a learning experience and if you stop learning, then you will never become a truly successful trader."
All you pimps all over the earth! Rock with this!
