Charlie Munger liked to joke, “At my age I don’t even buy green bananas.” Yet he kept making bold, long-term decisions until weeks before his 100th birthday.

His biggest lesson was about interdisciplinary, first-principles thinking.

Munger studied meteorology at Caltech and law at Harvard, but in the real world, he refused to live inside academic fences. He learned from everywhere.

He often reminded people:

“Reality is messy, complex, and interconnected. It cannot be understood through a single lens.”

“The world is not divided into academic departments.”

And the warning that followed:

“If you stay inside one discipline, you will suffer man-made disasters.”

Real problems, he said, demand cross-pollination — psychology, economics, engineering, biology, statistics, history. The more models you borrow, the fewer mistakes you make.

Munger even applied this mindset to the buildings he funded. He donated hundreds of millions to universities, but with one condition: they had to accept his design philosophy.

He didn’t want to bankroll anything he didn’t understand — and he thought a lot of conventional architecture was, as he put it, “massively stupid.”

His rules were simple: no wasted space, no pointless curves, no shared bedrooms, no bad acoustics. Use precast concrete. Put hallways and staircases outside. Make things work.

His favourite example of architectural insanity was bathrooms:

“Any time you go to a football game there’s a huge line outside the women’s bathroom. Who doesn’t know they use bathroom in a different way than men? What kind of idiot makes them the same size? A normal architect!”

At Harvard–Westlake in the ’90s, the science building he funded originally had equal-sized boys’ and girls’ bathrooms.

Munger stared at the architect and said, “We’re teaching biology in this building?”

The plans changed the next day.

When I read the story, I caught myself thinking: I’ve seen those long lines outside the ladies’ bathroom countless times.

Why did I never question it? Every office building or venue I’ve visited has equally sized bathrooms for men and women.

Where was the first-principles thinking? everything was in plain sight, but never questioned it, I had cognitively accepted it as normal.

Charlie was a billionaire partly for this reason — he had a remarkable ability to spot anomalies that looked perfectly normal to everyone else.

Take it easy until next time.

Blogging is something I enjoy, and I share my thoughts on my blog most weekends. Explore all my blogs at https://lnkd.in/ejq7CWaQ.

Views are my own.

Blogging is something I enjoy, and I share my thoughts on my blog most weekends.

Read all my “Notes to Self” at view all blogs.