Charlie Munger never had patience for self-pity. The longtime Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman, who died at age 99, lived through losses that would have broken most people—and still refused to see himself as a victim.
Janet Lowe's 2000 biography, "Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger," pulls back the curtain on what shaped that steel-spined philosophy. Munger endured a painful divorce in his early thirties, struggled financially, and then faced the unimaginable: in 1955, his 9-year-old son, Teddy, died of leukemia—an illness that had no treatment at the time. He was devastated but determined not to let despair consume him.
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As Lowe wrote, even decades later, Munger looked back on that period with clarity rather than sentimentality. "At age 76, Charlie Munger looks back on those years and notes that time takes some of the pain out of losing a child. If it didn't, he says, he doesn't know how the human race could continue. Munger believes that by coping as best he could with the tragedy of Teddy's death, he was doing the only rational thing. ‘You should never, when facing some unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase to two or three through your failure of will.'"
That sentence captures everything Munger stood for: rationality over self-pity, strength over surrender. He believed that tragedy was part of life—but wallowing in it only multiplied the pain.
His most famous articulation of that mindset comes from another passage from "Damn Right!" and quoted widely across his talks:
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"Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it's actually you who are ruining your life. It's such a simple idea. Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so-called ‘iron prescription'—I think that really works."
The "iron prescription," as he called it, was Munger's cure for misery: take ownership, stop assigning blame, and act. He wasn't suggesting self-blame as punishment—he was advocating for control. When you decide it's your responsibility to fix something, you regain power over your own life.
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And Munger lived that way. After Teddy's death, he rebuilt his life, remarried, and raised a blended family of eight children. He went on to help build one of the most successful partnerships in business history with Warren Buffett—still quipping, reading, and reasoning until the very end.
The lesson he left behind isn't complicated, but it's hard to live by: bad things will happen, but the worst thing you can do is let them define you twice. Munger's advice? Don't let one tragedy multiply through self-pity or excuses. Fix what you can. Endure what you must. And keep moving forward—damn right.
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