Simplicity

The “keep it simple” ethos as an investing and decision-making discipline. The wiki’s anchor is the Munger worldly-wisdom piece, which tags Simplicity to Einstein’s maxim: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no more simple.” The same source pairs it with Warren Buffett’s “Remember Your Helmet” line — Buffett joking that while Notre Dame’s locker-room sign reads “Play Like a Champion Today,” he and Munger are “‘Remember Your Helmet’ kind of guys” who “like to keep it simple.” The “but no more simple” qualifier is doing real work in context: the same passage warns that wanting things “totally easy and totally laid out” is a temptation to “join some cult that claims to provide all the answers,” and that you must instead “endure the world — as complicated as it is.” So simplicity here is not oversimplification; it is stripping a problem to its irreducible core without pretending the core is simpler than it is.

Context: The phrasing “as simple as possible, but no simpler” is widely attributed to Albert Einstein (a paraphrase of his 1933 remark on the aim of scientific theory). It captures the principle of parsimony — prefer the simplest explanation that still accounts for the evidence — long valued in both science and investing.

Where this appears

• Charlie Munger — A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, Revisited — Einstein’s “as simple as possible, but no more simple” tagged to the concept, paired with Warren Buffett’s “Remember Your Helmet” keep-it-simple ethos