“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”

— Charlie Munger

Read. A lot.

“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.”

— Charlie Munger

You need to be critical and always thinking. You need to do the mental work required to hold an opinion.

if we hadn’t been continuous learners, the record wouldn’t have been as good. And we were so extreme about it that we both spent the better part of our days reading, so we could learn more, which is not a common pattern in business.

“We don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.” And when it gets to the thinking part, for Buffett and Munger, there’s no one better to think with than their partners.

Munger once told a reporter. “We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we’ve spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly sitting and reading and thinking.”

In the long term, the investment in learning something new and improving yourself goes further.

We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.

in How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler writes: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

Another way to get smarter, outside of reading, is to surround yourself with people who are not afraid to challenge your ideas.