My son Adam’s wife is expecting a baby any day now, so we made the decision to stay close to home and miss this year’s Berkshire-Hathaway annual meeting. In past Blum family excursions to the “Woodstock for Capitalists,” I was honored three times to ask questions of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. My first was about their estate plans; my second was about their philanthropy; and my third was their advice for preparing heirs. Although I missed my chance to ask a fourth question this year, I couldn’t have topped the best question of the day. Like so much surprise wisdom that comes “out of the mouths of babes,” the question came from a kid: “If you had one more day with Charlie, what would you do with him?” Like everyone following the Q & A session that day, I was on the edge of my chair eager to hear Warren’s answer. He didn’t disappoint.
My mission in writing this weekly blog is to impart estate planning lessons from the head and the heart. Buffett’s answer was chock full of legacy planning advice. Even though we missed hearing how Charlie might have punctuated Warren’s answer with one of his famous one-liners, we can still hear those clever witticisms in our imagination. Charlie lives on in our minds and hearts.
Buffett reflected on his longtime close friendship with Charlie Munger, who “lived to 99.9 years” and died suddenly and peacefully last November 28, just 33 days before his 100th birthday. Warren joked that Charlie wouldn’t have wanted to know it was his last day, recalling Charlie’s quip: “Just tell me where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” He just lived every day to the fullest, and he did it with vigor and humor. That’s lesson number one.
Lesson two: Warren has no regrets. He can’t wind the clock back and have one more day with Charlie, but he wouldn’t need to. “In effect, I did have one more day. We always lived in a way where we were happy with what we were doing every day.” The message is to treat every time with your loved ones as if it were your last time with them. “If I’d have had another day with him, we’d have done the same thing we were doing on all the other days…. I can’t remember any time that he was mad at me, or I was mad at him.”
How did they spend those days together? That brings us to lesson three: their time together was enriching and productive. “We did keep learning, and we liked learning together.” As the years went by, they expanded their learning even more, because they made more mistakes and they learned from each of those mistakes. “We had as much fun, perhaps even more to some extent, with things that failed, because we really had to work our way out of them. And in a sense, there’s more fun having somebody that’s your partner in digging your way out of a foxhole than just sitting there and watching an idea that you got 10 years ago just continually produce more and more profits.” In this year’s annual letter to shareholders, Buffett humbly takes the blame for many of those mistakes, acknowledging that Munger “jerked me back to sanity when my old habits surfaced…. In reality, Charlie was the ‘architect’ of the present Berkshire, and I acted as the ‘general contractor’ to carry out the day-to-day construction of his vision.” Bottom line: embrace challenges and work with a partner to dig out of them.
Lesson four: As you age, stay interested and interesting. “He was not only interested in the world at 99, but the world was interested in him. I’d never seen anybody that was peaking at 99…. They all wanted to meet Charlie, and Charlie was happy to talk with them…. The world was still a very interesting place to us when he got to be 99 and I got to be 93.” Keep actively engaged with life. “What you should probably ask yourself is who do you feel that you’d want to start spending the last day of your life with? And then figure out a way to start meeting them, or tomorrow, and meet with them as often as you can, because why wait till the last day? And don’t bother with the others.” If you can’t meet them in person, read about them. Charlie was such a voracious reader that he felt he’d actually met the people he read so much about, including his favorite Ben Franklin.
Final lesson: live life the way you want to. That’s what Charlie Munger did, even down to the fact he “never did a day of exercise.” I don’t condone that, but hey, who am I to say? Charlie drank sodas, ate candy, never exercised, and lived to 99.9!
At last year’s meeting which occurred on the day of King Charles’ coronation, Warren dubbed Charlie as Berkshire’s King Charles. Even after he’s gone, we’re still learning lessons from our own King Charles. Rest in peace, Charlie Munger.
The most profound question for Warren Buffett came from this kid: “If you had one more day with Charlie, what would you do with him?”