After several months, I made a visit to Atanu’s blog.  As it turned out, time spent going through about 80 different posts was well-spent, if only for the discovery of this gem: It was an account of Charlie Munger’s 2007 Law School Commencement address.  Here are just a few excerpts…

Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning.

I went through life constantly practicing (because if you don’t practice it, you lose it) the multi-disciplinary approach and I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, its made me more helpful to others, its made me enormously rich. You name it, that attitude really helps. Now, there are dangers in it because it works so well that if you do it, you will frequently find you’re sitting in the presence of some other expert, maybe even an expert superior to you (supervising you), and you’ll know more than he does about his own specialty, a lot more. You’ll see the correct answer and he’s missed it. That is a very dangerous position to be in. You can cause enormous offense by being right in a way that causes somebody else to lose face. And I never found a perfect way to solve that problem. My advice to you is to learn sometimes to keep your light under a bushel.

[Told the story of Max Planck and his chauffeur. After winning the Nobel Prize, Planck toured around giving a speech. The chauffeur memorized the speech and asked if he could give it for him, pretending to be Planck, in Munich and Planck would pretend to be the chauffeur. Planck let him do it and after the speech someone asked a tough question. The real chauffeur said that he couldn’t believe someone in such an advanced city like Munich would ask such an elementary question and as such, he was going to ask his chauffeur (Planck) to reply].

In this world we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. And then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned the talk. They may have a big head of hair, they may have fine temper in the voice, they’ll make a hell of an impression. But in the end, all they have is chauffeur knowledge. And you are going to have the problem in your life of getting the responsibility into the people with the Planck knowledge [and away from the people with the chauffeur knowledge].

The last idea I want to give to you…..is that this is not the highest form that a civilization can reach. The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That’s the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic. So never forget, when you’re a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff but you don’t have to buy. What you want in your own life is a seamless web of deserved trust. And so if your proposed marriage contract has 47 pages, my suggestion is you not enter.

And, last but not the least, what is undoubtedly one of the best definitions of “Quality” at work, I have ever encountered:

Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.

Take the time to read the entire speech.  This one is well worth the effort.