Charlie Munger had a friend who carried a thick stack of cards with him. Whenever someone talked about feeling sorry for themselves, he would hand a card to the person with a dramatic gesture. The card said:
Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.
Munger himself suffered more misfortunes than most of us. At 29, he lost his house and was nearly broke when he divorced his first wife. Then, his 9-year-old son Teddy died of leukemia, which was incurable at that time. A complication during his cataract surgery also left him blind in one eye.
But he refused to wallow in self-pity, complain, or blame others for what happened to him—even though that is what most people would do. As John Gardner said, “Self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs.”
When asked how he got through his toughest moments, like slowly losing his son, Munger advised:
Well, we all know how to get through them. 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.
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. You just somehow soldier through.
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. You can cry all right, but you can’t quit.
Some of us do go through horrible, unfair hardships, like losing a loved one unexpectedly or having our life’s work burned to the ground. I’ve had my share of those. But I also recognize that many things I complained about were mere inconveniences or temporary hitches—which, if we are honest, are littered throughout everyone’s lives.
In either case, Munger believed that self-pity would never make the situation better. In fact, we will only make things worse if we dwell on it and don’t have the will to escape it. Instead, like Epictetus, we should think of every mischance in life as an opportunity to behave well. And we should use the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
So, if you find you are drifting into self-pity, Munger wants you to give yourself one of those cards: “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.”
Keep this letter in your book, and it will come back to you.