A commencement address that catalogues, one by one, the surest ways to ruin a life — so that avoiding them becomes the path to a good one.
Ask yourself how you would guarantee a miserable, unproductive life — then spend your life carefully walking the other direction from every answer.
One clarifying note: the "Harvard School" in the title is Harvard School for Boys, a Los Angeles-area college-preparatory school (today Harvard-Westlake) — not Harvard University. Munger delivered this address there in June 1986.
Munger opened by crediting Carson's own commencement remarks: ingest mood- or perception-altering chemicals, cultivate envy toward those who have more, and hold onto resentment. Any one of the three, sustained long enough, does real damage.
Simply fail, again and again, to deliver on what you've agreed to do. Munger argued that mastering unreliability alone is enough to counterbalance every other virtue a person might have.
Refuse to learn from the recorded successes and failures of others — insist on extracting every lesson firsthand, through your own costly trial and error, no matter how much slower or more painful that path is.
Munger warned that going down and staying down after a first, second, or third serious setback is one of the most reliable ways to guarantee permanent misery. Recovering from bad breaks isn't optional — it's foundational to everything else.
Munger told the story of Benjamin Disraeli, who couldn't quit resentment entirely but managed it: he kept a private list of grievances and took quiet satisfaction watching his rivals undone by the world, without lifting a finger himself. To guarantee misery, refuse even that partial release — nurse the resentment in full.
The inverse of the "be unreliable" prescription is one of Munger's quieter but most durable ideas: being someone others can depend on compounds over a lifetime, the same way unreliability compounds against you.
Before committing to a path, ask what would guarantee failure at it — then deliberately route around those exact behaviors.
Audit your own reliability. Are there small commitments you're quietly not keeping, the kind that erode trust slowly?
Notice when pride is stopping you from learning a lesson someone else already paid for, in a book or a conversation.
Check whether you're still "down" from a setback you should have gotten back up from long ago.
Practice releasing resentment deliberately — even Disraeli's partial version beats carrying it undiluted for life.
Tell me where I'm going to die, Munger liked to say, so that I never go there. The whole art of a good life is knowing, in advance, the roads that only lead to ruin.