Most people spend their lives trying to avoid pain. Charlie Munger didn't bother. He accepted it—stared it down, lived through it, and kept going. His advice? Life is brutal sometimes. Go ahead and cry. Just don't quit.
That mindset didn't come from comfort. It came from living nearly a century full of loss, disappointment, and, eventually, extraordinary success. In one of his final interviews before his death at 99, Munger—then the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway—opened up about the heartbreaks that shaped him, the philosophy that carried him, and why soldiering through is the only real option.
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"You can't bring back the dead, you can't cure the dying child. You can't do all kinds of things. You have to soldier through it," Munger told CNBC's Becky Quick. "If you have to walk through the streets, crying for a few hours a day as part of the soldiering, go ahead and cry away. But you have to – you can't quit."
That wasn't theory for Munger—it was experience. He lost his 9-year-old son, Teddy, to leukemia at a time when the disease was a death sentence. "I cried all the time when my first child died. But I knew I couldn't change the fate," he said. "In those days, the fatality with childhood leukemia was 100%."
But in true Munger fashion, he didn't linger in despair. He zoomed out. "What mankind and civilization did was soldier through those tough years," he said. "Imagine a cure. Imagine pretty well fixing that disease for families who came into life later. It's a huge achievement. You can see why I like civilization."
Munger didn't sugarcoat anything—not aging, not grief, not the grind. He spoke with dry, brutal honesty, the kind that's oddly comforting. "The iron rule of life is everybody struggles," he said. "The great philosophers of realism are also the great philosophers of what I call soldiering through. If you soldier through, you can get through almost anything. And it's your only option."
Even in his final years, Munger stayed sharp and amusing. Asked if he had anything left on his bucket list, he shrugged it off with signature wit. "I no longer want to catch a 200-pound tuna. It's just too goddamn much work to get it in," he said. "I would have paid any amount to catch a 200-pound tuna when I was younger. Now if given the opportunity, I would just decline going."
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He was also clear-eyed about marriage, money, and mortality. While Warren Buffett pledged most of his fortune to philanthropy, Munger said, "More than half of Munger money has already been passed to the descendants. So I made exactly the opposite… The majority of his money he gave away. And now he didn't exactly give it away. It goes to Buffett Foundations that go on for another 100 years."
Munger, ever the realist, saw his long marriage to second wife Nancy—52 years—as both a gift and a battle: "Now there were some tough stretches, but most lives have some tough stretches. And hers came very near the end."
For a man who built wealth, partnerships, and wisdom that outlived most of his peers, Munger never pretended it came easy. He just believed the hard parts were worth facing head-on.
"You can cry all right," he said, "but you can't quit."
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