The Too Hard Pile

From Munger’s Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award interview on December 14, 2020, a Zoom conversation hosted by Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, with the interview conducted by Prof. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (PhD ‘88) and questions from Caltech students and alumni. Munger gave this answer to “How does one guard against mental biases in decision making?” The “too hard pile” was the last item in a list of standing practices: rubbing his nose in his own mistakes, keeping things simple and fundamental, and applying the engineering concept of a margin of safety.

The pile sits inside Munger’s mental-biases answer, not a productivity one. The next question to him was about accepting limitations, and he answered with the same lever: “Knowing the edge of your own competency.” Past that edge the human mind still wants to keep reasoning. The pile is the discipline that stops it: if you can’t tell whether you’re right, set the problem aside instead of guessing.

The pile only works when you have the option to ignore something. The interviewer’s follow-up pushed on this directly: do those problems sometimes come back and force you to handle them? Munger said yes:

Oh, I sometimes get things that are “too hard” and when that happens I fail.

In context, the kind of problem that comes back is a too-hard problem you can no longer leave alone: your business has to make the call, the situation forces a decision, the deadline arrives. The pile is no help there. You have to decide anyway, and Munger admits that on those calls he loses.