Poor Charlie's Almanack, Charles Munger (9/10)

Rating: 9/10

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🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A nostalgic compilation of Charlie Munger's life stories, wisdom, insights, and strategies applied to investing and other areas of life
2. Advocates for a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving and decision-making
3. Based on Charlie's speeches, essays, and insights on personal and professional success

🎨 Impressions

• This was a really cool book from the first page. In fact, it's more than just a regular book – it's an experience. It's a super hefty and visually striking coffee table book that easily immerses the reader through its very colorful stories, animations, inserts, and the editor's commentary. It's casual and lighthearted while offering a unique journey into the mind of a genius and one of the world's most successful investors. As you learn more about Charlie's multidisciplinary approach to decision-making and problem-solving, you also find yourself entertained and enlightened by his humor and profound understanding of various fields, including psychology, economics, physics, chemistry, maths, philosophy, history, and biology.

🥰 Who Would Like It?

• Investors, entrepreneurs, lifelong learners, and thinkers. People interested in personal development and the application of multidisciplinary thinking to problem-solving.

☘️ Top Lessons

• Invert: Approaching problems by considering the opposite of what you want to achieve. For example – to be successful, study failure instead of success. Study how businesses decline and die. Start with failure and engineer its elimination.
• Flawed education system: The current education system fails to teach multidisciplinary thinking, and this has an underappreciated/recognized impact on society's ability to navigate the complexities of the modern world
• Value investing applied to life: Emphasize the importance of patience, discipline, and rationality when making (investment) decisions
• Circle of competence: Focus on areas where you have the most passion, knowledge, and expertise
• Wrong decisions and problems are a part of life - structure your life and business in a way where you will survive them
• Avoiding problems is better than having to deal with them. Wisdom lies in prevention
• Schedule time to do nothing. You just need to make high quality decisions
• Don’t let the thoughts of others interfere with your own
• Get into a good business and let compounding do the magic
• Never get into business with a B or a C-person. You can never turn them around. Giving advice to them is useless. Be careful, because mediocrity is everywhere, by definition
• Work with people you like, admire, and trust. Only associate yourself with first class people

💬 Top Quotes

• In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time – none, zero.
• It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent
• A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price
• Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant
• If you always tell people why, they'll understand it better, they'll consider it more important, and they'll be more likely to comply
• To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people
• Opportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you've got two suitors who are really eager to have you, and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that's the way we filter out buying opportunities