Charlie Munger? Warren Buffett? Andrew Kilpatrick? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: A famous investor once wrote about strategies for achieving wealth. The key was not concocting brilliant strategies; instead, the successful long-term investor triumphed by being “consistently not stupid”.
This notion has been attributed to U.S. businessman Charlie Munger. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Charlie Munger was the Chairman of the Board of the Wesco Financial Corporation, and the company’s annual reports often included letters from Munger. The 1989 annual report was released in 1990, and it contained a letter from Munger dated March 5, 1990. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: “It’s the strong swimmers who drown”.
Our approach, while it has worked fairly well on average in the past and will probably work fairly well over the long-term future, is bound to encounter periods of dullness and disadvantage as it limits action.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1994 Andrew Kilpatrick published “Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett”. Charlie Munger was a close partner of Warren Buffett, and the author discussed a message which Munger sent to shareholders of the company Wesco in 1989:2
Munger also makes the following point: “Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, ‘It’s the strong swimmers who drown.'”
In 2000 Janet Lowe published “Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger”. The passage containing the quotation appeared together with a footnote which pointed to the following:3
Charles Munger, Wesco Financial Corporation Annual Report, 1989.
In 2008 Peter D. Kaufman published the third edition of the compilation “Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger”. The third chapter “Mungerisms: Charlie Unscripted” contained the following passage:4
It is occasionally possible for a tortoise, content to assimilate proven insights of his best predecessors, to outrun hares that seek originality or don’t wish to be left out of some crowd folly that ignores the best work of the past. This happens as the tortoise stumbles on some particularly effective way to apply the best previous work, or simply avoids standard calamities.
We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
In 2014 a columnist in “The Globe and Mail” of Toronto, Canada wrote the following:5
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s investment philosophy has been a matter of public record for decades and yet few investors have the discipline to follow it. This Farnam Street blog post clearly lays out one the most important and successful aspects of Berkshire Hathaway’s investment method that is continually ignored by investors: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
In 2024 the “Tampa Bay Times” of Florida printed the following:6
Munger often summed up the key to Berkshire’s success as “trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” He and Buffett also were known for sticking to businesses they understood well.
In 2025 investor Barry Ritholtz mentioned this quotation in the preface to his book “How Not to Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behavior That Destroy Wealth — and How To Avoid Them”:7
Berkshire Hathaway’s inimitable Charlie Munger phrased it this way: “It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
In conclusion, Charlie Munger deserves credit for this quotation. It appeared in a March 5, 1990 letter which Munger wrote to shareholders of Wesco Financial Corporation. The letter was included in the 1989 annual report of Wesco. The quotation was reprinted in books such as “Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett” by Andrew Kilpatrick in 1994.
Image Notes: Graph depicting increasing wealth over time from Morgan Housel at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Barry Ritholtz who mentioned this quotation in his 2025 book “How Not to Invest”. This inspired QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Many thanks to Jesse Sheidlower and Stephen Goranson who kindly searched the ProQuest Historical Annual Reports. The 1989 Wesco report was absent, but this difficulty led to renewed successful efforts.
- 1990, Wesco Financial Corporation Annual Report 1989, Letter to Wesco stockholders from the Chairman of the Company Charles T. Munger, Date of Letter: March 5, 1990, Start Page 54, Quote Page 69, Published by Wesco Financial Corporation, Pasadena, California. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1994 Copyright, Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett by Andrew Kilpatrick, Chapter 35: Wesco: “A tourist-class ticket”, Quote Page 228, AKPE, Birmingham, Alabama. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2000 Copyright, Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger by Janet Lowe, Chapter 14: Charlie Munger Goes to War with the Savings and Loan Industry, Quote Page 159, John Wiley and Sons, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2008 (2019 15th Printing), Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition, Edited by Peter D. Kaufman, Chapter 3: Mungerisms: Charlie Unscripted, Highlights from Recent Berkshire Hathaway and Wesco Financial Annual Meetings by Whitney Tilson, The Donning Company Publishers, Virginia Beach, Virginia. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2014 June 12, The Globe and Mail (Online), Top links: IMF finds Canada housing overvalued by Scott Barlow, Toronto, Canada. (ProQuest) ↩︎
- 2024 May 5, Tampa Bay Times, Profit drops at Buffett’s firm but thousands still want to hear from the guru by Josh Funk (Associated Press), Quote Page 18A, Column 4, St. Petersburg, Florida. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 2025, How Not to Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behavior That Destroy Wealth — and How To Avoid Them by Barry Ritholtz, Preface: Consistently Not Stupid, Quote Page xviii, Harriman House Ltd., Petersfield, Hampshire, England. (Verified with hardcopy) ↩︎