Nobody is as happy as the person who is both very impulsive and very lucky.
I mean it's not some new discovery.
It was obvious for the attentive observer that Sinatra had lived a happier and more interesting life than Rockefeller.
Similarly Hugh Hefner has lived a more fulfilling life than Charlie Munger.
You gotta live in the moment and be impulsive to be happy. But to sustain those levels of impulsiveness you need luck to go your way to somehow always manage to avoid the negative consequences of impulsivity.
Whether it's some Mafia boss looking for a revenge after having been diluted from the record publishing partnership or some disgrunted Playboy bunny going on a media blitz aiming to gain a huge amount of money...both men needed a huge amount of luck to avoid being taken down.
They can't at all. They're projecting a strictly personal opinion based on their own value system and very distant perception of such disparate figures as Sinatra, Rockefeller, Munger and Hefner, which is rather spectacularly comical.
Sinatra had severe problems with not being happy and was frequently suicidal for example:
I'm sure a lot of people incorrectly perceived, at a great distance, that Robin Williams was consistently an exceptionally happy person also (based on his outward jovial disposition and the common reaction to his death by the public).
It's not about value systems, it's about rumination vs. non-rumination.
Sinatra and Hefner simply believed in their own mind that they were special and acted on it, whereas people like Munger , they ruminate for hours on end thinking about whether CPI would come out at 2.7% or 2.5% while already sitting on 5 billion dollars.
Also constantly pricing the odds of every move and generally thinking about stuff too much instead of acting and let the chips fall where they may.
It is clear that Munger and Buffett have a vastly different value system than you -- one where rumination makes them happy.
They could easily be living in giant mansions in Monaco, feasting on gourmet food cooked by personal private chefs every day, on superyachts in the Seychelles, or any other lavish-wealth scenario you'd care to name.
But they don't. They work in a modest office in Omaha, and eat McDonald's and drink Coke for lunch.
Why would they do that, when they have so many other options? Because they like it. Their value system is different than yours. They enjoy their relatively modest middle class lifestyles, believe it or not.
If they didn't, if they weren't happy, they could make a few phone calls and be on a private jet to the other side of the planet within an hour. But they don't do that, because they value that less than what they're doing now. They're happy ruminating on minute differences in CPI figures while eating an Egg McMuffin for breakfast.
> Why would they do that, when they have so many other options? Because they like it
I don't think it's because of that. I think it's because they have internalized the concept of global competition being a zero-sum game and can't let go of it because 100B is still nothing compared to the total size of the pie.
Sinatra instead didn't internalize anything, did deals with Mafia families, acted recklessly and yet he managed to shut down Las Vegas lights in 1999 when he passed and will be remembered long after Buffett is forgotten.
Acting impulsively + luck beats rumination every day. It's not even a contest.
We get your point, but at least two of us are not buying it. Happiness is a much more complex system than something that's directly and exclusively controlled by impulsiveness.
"Ruminating" is generally defined as thinking a lot about bad/negative things from the past.
Anyone who has paid any attention to Buffett or Munger will tell you there is no indication they do anything like "ruminate". They appear to think a lot and analyze things, but it's almost all forward looking. And they seem to be very happy. Munger even had a small child die of cancer and said something to the effect of "at some point you just have to dust yourself off and keep moving forward".
I believe that living this way you develop sense of risk. You know the world in more details, because you bumped into it.
When to try a little bold move because nobody dared and it's not that risky. VS jumping from the 13th floor.
Also with habits, you know what is failing, what is your insurance/mat, and how to size your bet.
Traders often use a 1% rule, but they know if they won regularly and they have a hunch on an asset, they can go 5% maybe 10%. A newbie won't have that subtle gradient.
For individual investors who are in the lucky position to be able to save money every year, one way to experience the thrill is to set aside a (small) fixed share of those annual savings for impulsive, risky bets.
> It's a shame our culture isn't very honest about this fact.
That's an interesting choice of words - "honest".
What is "our culture"?
Is it the social relations that occur between people? The books, the plays, the literature? The songs, the music? The customs that date back to the founding of the nation? The politness? The assumptions? The courtesies? The fashions? The engineering achievements? The political framework?
Or is it what we see on screens?
The problem with what we see on screens, even when it is any or all of the above, is that screens are powered by advertising.
Perhaps others have a different value system than yours, where vacations are less interesting than risky bets. Is that not valid? Are they not grownup adults with full agency?
Nobody is as happy as the person who is both very impulsive and very lucky.
I mean it's not some new discovery.
It was obvious for the attentive observer that Sinatra had lived a happier and more interesting life than Rockefeller.
Similarly Hugh Hefner has lived a more fulfilling life than Charlie Munger.
You gotta live in the moment and be impulsive to be happy. But to sustain those levels of impulsiveness you need luck to go your way to somehow always manage to avoid the negative consequences of impulsivity.
Whether it's some Mafia boss looking for a revenge after having been diluted from the record publishing partnership or some disgrunted Playboy bunny going on a media blitz aiming to gain a huge amount of money...both men needed a huge amount of luck to avoid being taken down.