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

Charlie detests placer mining, the process of sifting through piles of sand for specks of gold. Instead, he applies his “big ideas from the big disciplines” to find the large, unrecognized nuggets of gold that sometimes lie in plain sight on the ground.

Like my father, Abe Trillin had a fundamental reserve, partially Midwestern in origin, that was at odds with his personable qualities. He did not regard a long drive in a car or a fishing outing as an opportunity to catch up. He did not linger on the telephone. His son eventually came to marvel at “how much my father managed to get across to me wit

He especially assesses a company’s management well beyond conventional number crunching—in particular, the degree to which they are “able, trustworthy, and owner-oriented.” For example, how do they deploy cash? Do they allocate it intelligently on behalf of the owners or do they overcompensate themselves or pursue ego-oriented growth for growth’s s

reward. For instance, some people use money to buy status, and others use status to get money, while still others sort of do both things at the same time.

have a strong incentive to prevent all waste in operations within their ownership.

if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries.

Granny’s rule, to be specific, is the requirement that children eat their carrots before they get dessert. The business version requires that executives force themselves daily to first do their unpleasant and necessary tasks before rewarding themselves by proceeding to their pleasant tasks.

The strong tendency of employees to rationalize bad conduct in order to get rewards requires many antidotes in addition to the good cash control promoted by Patterson.

“Charlie, when you borrow a man’s car, you always return it with a full tank of gas.”

Personally, I’ve gotten so that I now use a kind of two-track analysis. First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered? And second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain, at a subconscious level, is automatically doing these things—which, by and large, are useful but which often misfuncti