An Introduction to Project 1899.

At the pivotal moment of choosing a career, it is said that one should specialise: go narrow, drill deep, and become the best in the world at one small thing. It is just as often said that one should do the opposite, staying broad, reading widely, and keeping every option open. Most people spend a lifetime quietly torn between the two, suspecting that whichever they chose, they chose wrong.

Charlie Munger's genius was to notice that this was a false choice, and to refuse it.

Munger, the lawyer-turned-investor who spent half a century as Warren Buffett's partner, built his thinking around a single image: a latticework of mental models. He believed that the big ideas from every major discipline, such as the compounding of mathematics, the natural selection of biology, the incentives of economics, and the systematic self-deceptions catalogued by psychology, could be hung together in the mind like slats on a lattice, each one gaining strength from its connection to the others. It is an unusually beautiful way to think about competence, held by an unusually interesting man.

To learn these models, and to press them so deeply into his mind that they became instinct, his favoured medium was not the textbook but the life. He read biographies, the stories of the "eminent dead," from whom he claimed you could befriend the greatest minds in history and inherit their hard-won lessons without having to repeat their mistakes.

And yet he was not arguing for breadth over depth. He was himself a fierce specialist, a man whose craft was the narrow and unforgiving art of allocating capital, who simply refused to let his specialty become his prison. The latticework was never meant to replace expertise. It was meant to protect it: to tell the expert when his problem secretly belonged to another field, to catch the blind spots his own training had quietly installed, and above all to show him the edge of his competence, so that he might know where his knowledge ended and his ignorance began. The man with only a hammer, in Munger's famous warning, sees every problem as a nail, not because he lacks depth, but because he lacks everything else.

This newsletter will be neither perfect nor a means of commercial gain. It is, most simply, the public journal of someone who admires the ideas of Charlie Munger, who is deeply taken with curiosity, who is an avid student of biographies, and who happens to learn by writing. It is nothing grander than a learning journal, built in the open.

Across the issues of this newsletter, I will work through mental models of my own, drawn from wherever they happen to live: in mathematics, in history, in biology, in the quiet machinery of human psychology and more than anything I will study the great businesses and great people making connection to what made them truly incredible. I will trace the great ideas buried in biographies, the lessons that only reveal themselves when you watch how a real life was actually lived. And I will try to knit these threads together through essays, because writing is the only way I know to find out what I actually think.

So the material will mostly be lives and companies. Two versions of the same subject, in a way, since a business is a life with better records. Someone founds it, decides badly, decides well, and the ledger keeps score in a manner that biography rarely does. Munger studied Coca-Cola and See's and Costco the way other men study novels, and he was right to, because a company is where an idea is finally tested against the world and either pays or does not. The biography gives you the interior, what a person believed and feared and told themselves at the time. The company story gives you the machinery, what those beliefs actually built and what it cost to build them. I want both. Read together they show you not just the decision but the weather it was made in, and that is usually the part worth knowing.

The ambition is modest in one sense and enormous in another. I do not expect to arrive anywhere finished. But I hope that with each issue, slat by slat, I can begin to build a latticework of my own, and perhaps in time to think a little more like the great Charlie Munger.

That is the whole of it. One curious mind, a stack of biographies and company stories, and the slow, deliberate work of building a structure worth hanging a life's thinking on.

A Note on the Name

In December 1899, a twenty-five-year-old war correspondent named Winston Churchill climbed the wall of a prison camp in Pretoria and dropped into the dark. He had no map, no compass, and almost no plan - only the conviction that he was not meant to sit still. He crossed nearly three hundred miles of hostile territory, hiding in mine shafts and freight wagons, and emerged a free man and, shortly afterwards, a famous one.

What is easy to forget is that Churchill was in South Africa because of his pen. He was not yet a statesman; he was a young man funding his ambitions by writing about his adventures, learning about the world by describing it. The writing came first. Everything else followed.

That is the spirit of this newsletter. Project 1899 is an exercise in learning by writing - one subject at a time, from marketing to finance, history to philosophy.

The year 1899 marks the moment a curious young man bet on himself with nothing but courage and a pen.