We live in an amazing time. Right this very moment, you can summon the knowledge from some of the smartest people who ever lived. Books (or Kindle/Audible) are very inexpensive, and you can even use your local library to make it free. In a bit of a meta twist, the examples I’ll share today are from “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“; author Charlie Munger himself is easily considered among the eminent dead, but his thoughts today are encouragement to read from others.
Charlie says:
I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the “eminent dead,” but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just giving the basic concepts.
Later, he phrases it slightly differently:
Let me further develop the idea that a multidisciplinary attitude is required if maturity is to be effective. Here I’m following a key idea of the greatest lawyer of antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero is famous for saying that a man who doesn’t know what happened before he’s born goes through life like a child. That is a very correct idea. Cicero is right to ridicule somebody so foolish as not to know history.
It’s a concept that I also hear quite a lot on the Founders podcast. The entire point of that show is to learn from the eminent dead, and David talks about that idea in almost every episode.
I’ve learned a lot over the course of my life, and there is a huge amount left to learn. To be able to call on anyone from history and learn from them is an exceptional gift, and one that we should all take advantage of as often as possible.
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