Charlie believed in old fashioned values like family comes first, be in a position so you can help others, prudence is more important than being rich or being important and have a good sense of humor. He was once asked how he ended up in Michigan for college and his witty response was “Very simple, I wanted to go to Stanford”.
In an interview, he once said that he took Mathematics in college because it was easy for him. A lesson which Charlie has time and again reminded us, that is to do what comes naturally. Charlie placed ideas into one of the Yes/No/Too Hard piles and he has chosen to pursue things that come naturally to him. This is a key ingredient in great work. As Steve Jobs has said “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do”.
It is hard to love something if you are not having fun doing it, I don’t mean to say, the thing has to be easy to do, it could be hard, there may be days where you are not in the mood to do it but it still fun to do, at least a good chunk of it should be, not necessarily all of it but if everything about it is a constant struggle then it doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t bother, move on.
I don’t believe we have any limits in what we can achieve, of course there are exceptions, but, to believe that we can accomplish all things equally well and to the highest caliber is to be delusional. There are certain things that come naturally to each of us and others that don’t. It is more productive and more meaningful to pursue what comes naturally and develop that craft seriously. Quoting Charlie again, “Take a simple idea and take it very seriously”.
“For him [Cicero] the only life worth living is dedicated in substantial part to good outcomes one cannot possibly survive to see.”. Charlie says, to Cicero, if you live right, the inferior part of life is the early part. This resonates well with me, I feel that I am getting better as I age, it’s a feeling, can’t quantify, sorry!
I had learned something similar while studying at MIT, in the common areas of MIT, like meeting rooms, there used to be a printed note on the walls that read something like “Leave the place better than you found it”.
Charlie narrates a similar story about his father in the poor Charlie’s Almanac.
“On the last day of a family ski vacation in Sun Valley when I was fifteen or so, my dad and I were driving back in the snow when he took a ten-minute detour to gas the red jeep we were driving. He was pressed for time to have our family catch the plane home, so I was surprised to notice as he pulled into the station that the tank was still half-full. I asked my dad why we had stopped when we had plenty of gas, and he admonished me: “Charlie, when you borrow a man’s car, you always return it with a full tank of gas.”