Why Inconsistency is Worse than Snorting Cocaine
Charlie Munger on how to be a miserable failure in 7 easy steps • What Aesop’s tortoise and hare teaches about the power of habit • Leadership Land reader check-in #4
We have a tradition of writing one “check-in” article after 10 regular ones. While the regular articles wander through the landscape of Leadership Land, the check-ins are for making sure we haven’t lost our way.
In 1986, the late Charlie Munger gave a commencement address at the Harvard School1. He urged his audience to be unreliable, saying:
Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one trait, you will more than counterbalance the combined effects of all your virtues, howsoever great. Master this one habit, and you will always play the role of the hare in the fable, except that instead of being outrun by one fine turtle2, you will be outrun by hordes and hordes of mediocre turtles and even some mediocre turtles on crutches.
The topic of Munger’s speech was “7 ways to become a miserable failure,” but he didn’t seriously wish that upon the new graduates (which included his son). Munger gave the opposite of a clichéd commencement address3, trusting that his audience was sharp enough to follow the opposite of his advice.
Here are Munger’s seven prescriptions to guarantee a life of disappointment:
Do drugs. Lots of them. Mind-altering and addictive drugs are excellent ways to turn second-rate mediocrity into first-rate failure.
Feed the bottomless pit of envy. Don’t let comparisons to other people uplift or inspire you; the envy should seethe inside you like sulfuric acid poured on your soul.
Stew in resentment. When someone stings you with a rebuke or wins something you desire, never let it go. Hold a bitter grudge against them forever.
Be unreliable. The subject of today’s post.
Learn only from your own experiences. Don’t live vicariously through the successes and failures of others; that’s what winners do.
When at first you don’t succeed…wallow in the dirt, whine about it, and give up. Perseverance is for successful people, but you’re trying to be a miserable failure, remember?
Dismiss the uneducated peasant who said “I wish I knew where I’m going to die, so I could never go there.” Don’t distinguish between striving for success and avoiding failure. You should always think through your problems in the forward direction; never attempt to solve your problems backwards. Don’t be like Charles Darwin and seek disconfirmatory evidence; always look for confirmation of your cherished beliefs so you can pat yourself on the back for always being right.
We’ve diligently avoided all of Munger’s advice, except for #4: unreliability. Recall Munger’s quote from the beginning of this article: being unreliable will more than counterbalance the combined effects of our virtues. Our publishing schedule has been so erratic that Adventures in Leadership Land is virtually guaranteed to end up in the Silent Graveyard of history.
2-Year Review of Adventures in Leadership Land
Before we self-flagellate for our failures, please allow us to indulge in a bit of masturbatory boasting. Between September 2022 and November 2024, we published 44 articles that contained 98,205 words. Most novels have a word count between 80,000 and 100,000. Some professional writers take 3-10 years to write a novel (meh) and others take one month (amazing). We’re merely peasants amateurs who managed to write the equivalent of a novel in two years, while thriving at our full-time day jobs.
Not too shabby. Given the circumstances, we’d rate our overall productivity as “a-meh-zing.”
Resuming self-flagellation in 3…2…1…
Back in check-in #2, we aspired to publish regularly so that subscribers had something to look forward to when a certain day of the week rolled around. Here’s how that turned out:
The verdict: miserable failure. In the literal sense of the term, not in a George W. Bush Google-bomb sort of way. We’ve been writing like start-and-stop hares, not slow-and-steady turtles. The dot plot illustrates our sprints interspersed with long naps.
But wait! It gets worse.
This chart shows that a large chunk of our productivity (23%) came in the first three months after launch (11% of the total time). Worse still, our productivity has been declining steadily since late 2023.
We’re pusillanimous humans with fragile egos. Confronted with evidence of our shortcomings, our kneejerk reaction is to make excuses:
Creative work can’t be manufactured on a steady schedule like widgets on an assembly line.
The early articles we churned out were low-quality. We ended up rewriting large sections of early posts like Competitive Hawk vs. Cooperative Dove: Which Type of Leader Are You?
Illness. Promotions. Travel. Holidays with intrusive family. Life got in the way.
Consistency in writing means inconsistency (or quitting) somewhere else where we’re currently reliable.
We provide readers with entertainment, insights, and schadenfreude for free. Not a bad deal, even if it comes inconsistently!
We could make these excuses and continue what we’ve been doing. Or we could listen to role models like Charlie Munger and whip ourselves into shape.
Why is Inconsistency Worse Than Snorting Cocaine?
Charlie Munger singled out unreliability as being the one trait that will outweigh all other virtues, howsoever great. Why did he say that? Is inconsistency worse than being doing drugs, corroding one’s soul with envy and resentment, or never learning from other people’s mistakes?
Yes, in a sense.
Many people succeed despite following Munger’s “how to be a miserable failure” advice. A cocaine-snorting, resentful, envious musician who’s oblivious to the struggles of fellow musicians (AKA “baristas”) and can only think in the forward direction…isn’t that every successful musician out there? Consistency alone propels a musician to superstardom. They show up every day and grind out 10,000+ hours of deliberate practice until they finally master their art. They show up reliably to roll the dice, again and again, until they finally get their lucky break.
So yes, you can follow the majority of Munger’s “miserable failure” advice and still win. All you need is to consistently play the lottery until you win, or to be the last person standing while others drop like flies around you.
Contrast the successful musicians with us. We don’t do drugs. We’re relatively unburdened by envy and resentment. We habitually try to learn from the mistakes of others and think backwards as well as forward. But writing inconsistently means it’ll take us much longer to grind out 10,000+ hours of deliberate practice. We’ll never get from a-meh-zing to amazing within a human lifespan. If we don’t even show up to roll the dice, we’ll never get a lucky break, period.
Aesop’s tortoise won the race by using the power of habit
Aesop’s fables are simple enough for indoctrinating children, but there’s some deeper lessons here for adults, too. There’s another reason Charlie Munger singled out unreliability to be the guarantor of failure: it’s because inconsistency prevents habit formation.
You know why most New Year’s resolutions fail? Most people are like us writing hundreds of words per day in the first three months of Adventures in Leadership Land; they commit to a New Year’s resolution and exert a massive burst of energy on January 1. Eager to make a big, splashy change, they sign up for gym memberships and hop on the treadmill. They create a budget and refinance their debt. They tell themselves:
2025 is the year that I’ll get six-pack abs!
2025 is the year that I’ll fix my finances!
2025 is the year that will put Adventures in Leadership Land on the map!
Basically, “this time, it’s different.” Golly gee whiz, wishful thinking sure comes in a lot of different flavors!
Then reality sets in: this high level of effort is unsustainable. After setting an impossibly high bar early on, each subsequent effort is more disappointing than the last. The balloon of motivation deflates with the pffffffft of a wet fart, leaving behind a reeking cloud of despair and shame. By the end of February, most New Year’s resolutions have been abandoned before the new behaviors can become entrenched habits.
The few people who successfully lose weight or improve their finances are the tortoises who build habits. Instead of rushing ahead at top speed like the hare in Aesop’s fable, they start small and sustainable, slow and steady. They crawl slowly enough to maintain consistency, simply placing one foot in front of the other until the habit takes root. By the end of the year, the tortoises’ habits are so ingrained that they feel weird to not exercise or to not pay themselves first.
The Leadership Land Consistency Challenge
Charlie Munger was right, as usual. We were smart enough to concoct plausible excuses for why we deserve naps in the middle of a footrace, and dumb enough to swallow our own B.S. for two straight years.
If we remain mired in our unreliable ways, Adventures in Leadership Land will suffer the same fate as the hare in Aesop’s fable. We can only build good writing habits if we maintain a consistent publishing schedule. You, the reader, will not habitually check our blog unless you can expect us to deliver as promised4.
Unfortunately, we don’t know what a sustainable publishing schedule looks like yet. We’ll have to experiment, collect data, refine, and reiterate. For Phase 1 of the Leadership Land Consistency Challenge, we’ll publish one article every Friday beginning December 20, 2024, concluding with reader check-in #5 on February 28, 2025. That’s 10 regular articles, followed by check-in #5 to evaluate how Phase 1 went.
One article per week seems like a lot, but that’s why it’s a “challenge,” right? We don’t intend on quitting our day jobs because we wouldn’t feel qualified to write about leadership unless we practice what we preach. If one of us receives a big promotion, then it would further reduce the time available for writing. Between now and December 20, we’ll be writing furiously to build up a buffer and hedge against uncertainty.
If one article per week is unsustainable, or if we must invoke force majeure (Martian invasion, COVID-24 emergence, etc.), then we will recycle old articles as a cheap cop-out.
Goodharting ourselves to death
Even if we manage to write consistently, there’s one final wrinkle that could prevent a-meh-zing from becoming legitimately amazing. If you’ve ever been in charge of implementing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in your career, you’ve probably felt the pull of Goodhart’s Law. A simple form of Goodhart’s Law5 states:
When a measure becomes a target, it eventually ceases to be a good measure.
By committing to publishing one article per week, we are setting a KPI for ourselves. We have chosen to prioritize quantity over quality. Our next 11 posts might be less humorous and less insightful. They might be coarser than usual, possibly stuffed full of half-baked ideas that make no sense. They will almost certainly be shorter, which might be a blessing if the quality of our writing declines. There’s also the risk of burnout if writing Adventures in Leadership Land ceases to be fun.
In other words, consistency might help us develop writing habits, but they might be bad habits. Please help us discover the fine balance between quality vs. quantity by commenting on upcoming posts. If you’re a subscriber, you can also reply directly to the newsletters that land in your inbox! We’ve had engaging conversations with readers who prefer not comment publicly.
See you on December 20, 2024!
The former Harvard School (now the Harvard-Westlake School) is a private high school in Los Angeles. It’s unrelated to the Ivy League university in Massachusetts.
In this article, we use “turtle” and “tortoise” interchangeably. If you’re a herpetologist, we recommend you stop reading before you regress into a reptilian R A G E 🐊🐢🦎🐍.
A clichéd commencement address is what you get when the speaker asks ChatGPT to summarize a self-help book, then reads the summary from a podium. They often cover topics like “follow your dreams/heart/impulses” or “[X] ways to accomplish [Y],” leaving out the important subtitle “[X] ways to accomplish [Y] that worked for me several decades ago, but probably won’t work for you anymore now that the secret is out and all your competitors are following the same advice.”
Counterpoint: our inconsistent publishing schedule might make certain personality types check our blog compulsively. B.F. Skinner’s torture research on rats and pigeons found that random rewards lead to compulsive, sometimes superstitious behaviors. Casinos know this well; their slot machines dispense an inconsistent stream of near-misses and occasional noisy wins. Social media is a bottomless treasure hunt, addictive because of how inconsistently rewarding it is – think of the random notifications that steal your attention from more important things, or the urge to scroll past tons of drivel to find something that make you not dead inside.
Goodhart’s Law is wonderfully self-descriptive because its victims tend to have good hearts and good intentions. In their quest to meet KPIs, leaders often get lost in the Desert of Good Intentions and are swallowed up by the unintended consequences lurking underneath.