Repeat What Works
Updated 2026-08-11
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Repeat what works is the principle that behaviours producing good outcomes should be preserved and repeated while ineffective ones are discarded, an evolutionary selection process operating on behaviour rather than on genes. Munger argues in Poor Charlie's Almanack that both its power and its danger are widely underestimated. The principle requires no prior theory of why a behaviour succeeds, which is its strength, but it holds only while the environment that rewarded the behaviour remains stable.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Success inventory: name the behaviours that have reliably produced results over the past year - Assumption audit: write down the environmental conditions each behaviour depends on - Scheduled retest: recheck those environmental conditions each quarter before deciding to repeat the behaviour again
Anchor fast decisions
Where feedback is clear, repeating effective behaviour amounts to screening with real outcomes: high-return actions are kept, low-return actions are dropped, and average results rise without anyone first understanding the cause of success. It works because it sidesteps the attribution problem and lets results speak. Its validity depends on two conditions, a reasonably stable environment and feedback that separates good behaviour from bad in time; once either fails, the repeated behaviour keeps being reinforced while no longer producing its former result.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- mungermodels.comhttps://mungermodels.com/models/repeat-what-worksverified
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