Charlie Munger spent his life studying incentives, yet insisted he had underestimated their power all along.

"I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther."

The man who built one of the great investment records of the twentieth century, on the explicit principle of always looking at incentives first, was telling a room full of Harvard students that he was still underestimating them at 71.

If he was, I am, and you are.

That's rare information: a precise direction in which we are severely wrong, confirmed by the man best positioned to know.

He just gave us a simple way to be much less wrong. Another one.