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Mark Hovde's avatar

Excellent! Love Charlie and Warren. Essentially this is the HBS case method. You read 800 cases. Most cases show you one or two things that can cause a business to fail. You start to recognize patterns to avoid.

It can make you seem something of a grump. People who have business ideas may come to you, and you’ll find yourself giving advice that picks them apart most of the time. You have to be careful not to discourage them.

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Joe Hovde's avatar

Interesting! I didn't know the cases tended to highlight issues / failure causes.

I often hear that that is the difference between a venture capitalist mindset and a private equity mindset -- the former is looking for reasons something can succeed, the latter is looking for reasons something can fail

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James Nicholas's avatar

trial, error, success, and learning.

We hear that one learns by trial and error, and that it true. However, since there are usually so many chances for error, we learn only a little bit from a trial that leads to an error--that that particular attempt did not succeed. What really leads to learning is trial and success. I think that what Munger tries to do Is to identify pre-trial what trials would lead to error and thereby eliminate the costs of those trials.

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