"Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty." - Socrates
Nöjdhet är naturlig rikedom; lyx är konstgjord fattigdom |
Luxury also feels kind of like waste - too unnecessarily and adds just temporary joy.
1:27:55 “I think part of enjoying life is to just see it like it is, and face it like it is and adapt to the reality as it is whether you like it or not. And the reality as it is, is that Michigan is not gonna dominate the world in autos the way it once did. The batons been passed. Athens is never again gonna be the leader of all civilizations, nor is Rom, nor is London.. The baton passes.” – Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger Picture from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger |
1:28:30 “The iron rule of life in historical sense is that if you are lucky enough to be in a leadership position eventually you have to pass the baton. That’s the rule of human systems. Biologically we all have to die and at successful system we eventually have to pass the baton. Those are the rules. If you don’t like them you are on the wrong earth.” – Charlie Munger
0:50 ”The idea that the safest way to try go get what you want is to try and deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea but the golden rule so to speak.” – Charlie Munger
“Deliver what you wanna buy if the circumstances where reversed.” – Charlie Munger
“My sense is that if you wanna change the world you start from yourself and work outwards because you build your competence that way.” – Jordan Peterson, hos Joe Rogan
“So imagine that you’re dealing with someone hoarding, there’s like 10 thousand things in there house, there’s maybe a hundred boxes and you open up a box and in the box there’s some pens and some old passports, some checks and their collection of silver dollars and some hyperemic needles some dust and you know a dead mouse . There’s boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house. It’s absolute chaos in there, absolute chaos. Not order, chaos. And then you think. Is that their house or is that their being? Is that their mind? And the answer is, there is no difference. There’s no difference. So you know I could say, well if you wanna organize you psyche you could start by organizing your room. You go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk.
And you think: just exactly what are you organizing, are you organizing the objective world or are you organizing your field of being. Your field of total experience. And Jung believed that, and I think there’s a Buddhist doctrine that sort of nested in there that at the highest level of psychologic integration there’s no difference between you and what you experience. And it’s very useful to think that way because you might ask. What could you do to improve yourself? Well let’s step one step backwards, the first question might be “Why should you even bother improving yourself? And I think the answer to that is something like: So you don’t suffer anymore stupidly than you have to. That’s not some casual self-help doctrine it’s that if you don’t organize yourself properly you’ll pay for it, and in a big way. And so will the people around you. And you could say, “well I don’t care about that” but that’s not actually true. You actually do care about that because if you’re in pain you will care about it. It’s very rare that you could find someone who’s in excruciating pain would ever say “well it would be not better if I was out of this”. You get your act together so that there isn’t any more stupid pain around you than necessary.
I like the idea of the room because you can do that at a drop of a hat. You know.. Go back to where you live and sit down and think. Okay, I’m gonna make this place better for half an hour. What should I do? You have to ask! And things will just pop up like mad and it’s partly because your mind is a very strange thing. As soon as you give it an aim, a genuine aim, it will reconfigure the world and keeping with that aim is actually how you see to begin with. And so if you set it a task you have to be genuine about it which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and then you have to get them in your body so you’re acting consistently. You have to be genuine about the aim but once you aim the world will reconfigure itself around that aim. It’s very strange.” – Jordan B. Peterson
6:40 “I’m really following a very key idea of the greatest lawyer of antiquity Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero is famous for saying “A man who doesn’t know what happened before he’s born goes through life like a child”. That is a very correct idea of Cicero and he’s right. To ridicule somebody so foolish as not to know what happened before he was born. But if you generalize Cicero as I think one should there all this other things that you should know in addition to history. And those other things are the big ideas and all the other disciplines. And it doesn’t help you just to know them enough so you can prattle them back on an exam and get an A. You have to learn these things in such a way that they are a mental lattice work in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. If you do that I solemnly promise you that one day you’ll be walking down the street and look to your right and left and you’ll think my heavenly days I’m now one of the few most competent people of my whole age cohort.” – Charlie Munger, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1EMkanyz5Y
35:10 ”When I started down this path I used to think that freedom or more specifically financial independence leads to happiness, and I think it can but I think it’s reversed. I think happiness leads to freedom. And the reason I know this is because I know a lot of people that are financial independent, they are a 100 percent miserably. They’re lonely, they’re anxious, they’re fearful but they’re free and financial independence is not the end goal. Happiness is the end goal. So we need to always keep that in mind. You need to internalize that message. Happiness leads to freedom and to be honest it’s not that expensive to become happy. I mean you can cultivate happiness in your life with really simple things that write about, like gratitude, getting rid of negatives from your life. Decluttering all the physical things you don’t need, and your mental baggage and obligations. Like I said, stop watching news, you know, just walk, meditate, those things don’t cost anything but they’ll make you happy and happiness is freedom. You have to practice, it’s a skill, happiness is definitely a skill. It’s not something we just blunder into for the most part.” – Jeff, The happy philosopher, #36 – The Happy Philosopher – Semiretirement and Finding Happiness
27:15 ”The population has been so confused by this fundamentally, this huge experiment and propaganda of like dirtying or minds with ideas that rationally doesn’t make any sense. That, the mind is confused.” – Vicky Robin
48:15 ”Money is simply the life energy, the hours you trade for it.
The transformational core.. So people become natural savers.
“It’s basically an experimental process of buying something and asking yourself is this worth the life energy? It’s a process of being conscious in your relation with the material world and I think that is another transformal step, you take your expenses and you put them into categories, tell yourself the truth about yourself you know yea, drug habit, I don’t know if it’s in the food category but you know a third of my money is going to my drug habit. You discover that, you stop telling yourself lies. Actually concretely thinking about where each of these expenses fits. In a pattern that is your life, it’s not a budget book pattern, it’s patterns derived from your life. And then for each of these steps you ask yourself does core questions, does it make me happy? Is it in service to anything that I think is important. And you know, would I be spending this money this way if I didn’t have to work for a living? That piece is if I could just deliver that piece in all its glory. I think that I trust that the rest works out.” - Author Vicki Robin
51:10 “Build your ark that will float your boat for the rest of your life and that there are basically I call it 4 pillows of wealth. One of which is involves money, but the other 3 I call it an ark because “A” is for your abilities so you take it out of the money economy and a do it yourself economy. There are also skills that you can sell or trade if you B, so basically building those skills whether it be website design or you know. Whatever those skills are you know coaching people on you know on success." - Vicky Robin
52:00 "Investing in those skills that would both make your life happier, less expensive and valuable to others, efficiency, it’s tradable or money. That’s a big part of if. I wanna live with people that can do stuff, who are competent and just don’t flap their arms when anything goes wrong. Try to figure out what person I should call to fix it for me. So your abilities is part of your kit. Part of your financial independence.
And then the “R” is for relationships, and you know loneliness is epidemic. And loneliness is expensive because there’s a range of things that you gonna do that cost you money. You know, your Yoga work shop, your therapy, to you know like your bar tab, hahah.” - Author Vicki Robin
53:00 “It’s like you know, it’s expensive to be lonely. And so I think consciously building and repairing your closest relationships, people who will take care of you over time.” - Author Vicki Robin
53:30 “Community as currency”“Your relationship with the intimate people who will show up for you in times of need , your friends indeed, otherwise you are going to have to use all kinds of insurance to survive because you’re gonna have old age insurance and you’re going to have your sickness care insurance and you know turn to the insurance industry to assure yourself to things that people used to provide for one and other.” – Vicky Robin
54:15 “And then the “K” is the hard C in community. I wished it worked better but it doesn’t so.. The Ark, and community is different from your relationships. Your relationship is the intimate people who show up to you. Community is “what is the social safety net”, “can I grow food”, “is there water”, you know it’s like your place on earth, you know, what grows here, what is the climate like, are there community organizations where people tend to one another. It’s choosing and building and participating in a real place on the planet. I think that’s important. And then as if for your stuff, you know, is it durable? Are you transforming things that are flows, like I gotta upgrade my computer every 2-years . To things that are your stockpile, you know, the things that will last longer than you will. That can be put in the grave with you, like the ancient did with their gold. And so basically that’s a piece, I wanna draw people’s attention to becoming a competent connected human is a piece of your security, and it’s maybe a bigger piece of your security than your final assets, which is your savings.” – Vicky Robin
56:55 “And I’m also redefining financial independence really is having choice in your life about where you put your life energy.” – Vicky Robin