Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

Lawyer, investor, and all-around-dynamo that created an unimaginable amount of wealth for Berkshire Hathaway and himself together with Warren Buffet. And this book was a collection of his talks given at commencement addresses, philanthropy galas, and other events that were blessed by his forthright wisdom.

Munger's use of a "latticework of mental models" validates what I have generally called the "Medici Effect", wherein knowing the principles across a variety of subjects can help you quickly eliminate bullshit and get to good decisions more often than not. But the distinction I'm taking away here is that Munger's mental models help distill information at hand, whereas the Medici Effect is more for creating something new and innovative from seemingly disparate sources. Regardless, both systems demonstrate the benefit of broadly learning because some easy application of fundamentals can help you cut through a lot of the noise in this world and do great things.

You'll (hopefully) find yourself disagreeing with him to an extent on some of this; survivorship bias and hindsight help him see some things clearly and he'll tell you how much luck played into some of the success, but by and large it's an excellent quasi-Poor Richard's Almanac like one of his heroes Ben Franklin penned long before.

Anyhoo, I listened to this in chunks. There's some repetition between talks, although well edited generally speaking. And there's nothing too riveting narrative-wise like his rise to power -- just poignant thoughts applied and directed to an audience who is as invested in success like he was.

The narrator was good and the length was fine. I recommend this if you're interested in installing some mental models (or rather updating and refining the ones you likely already have if you're reading this). And while I didn't fully agree with him on everything, the desire for a serious approach to psychological effects on economics (and in my case, marketing in particular), is something I'd like to further at least by recommending it to another worthy steward.

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