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

by Charles T. Munger

He once said that he was nonconformist enough in his behavior and opinions that it made sense to chart a very straight course in attire. His going along with normal social customs and his sense of humor, he said, were what allowed his otherwise sometimes prickly temperament to harmonize with other people.

As John Muir observed about the interconnectedness of nature, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Enjoy the process along with the proceeds, because the process is where you live.

His rule for all the Braun Company’s communications was called the five Ws: You had to tell who was going to do what, where, when, and why.

Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire. Work only with people you enjoy.

So it’s much better to let some things go uncompensated—to let life be hard—than to create systems that are easy to cheat.

So we’ve succeeded by making the world easy for ourselves, not by solving hard problems.

there’s no way that you can live an adequate life without making many mistakes. Part of what you must learn is how to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds. Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand.

Good literature makes the reader reach a little for understanding. Then it works better.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.

“The company that needs a new machine tool and hasn’t bought it is already paying for it.”

Indexing can’t work well forever if almost everybody turns to it. But it will work all right for a long time.

I can’t remember if it was Keynes or Galbraith who said that economics professors are most economical with ideas. They make a few they learned in graduate school last a lifetime.

Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah: “Where there is no bread, there is no law; where there is no law, there is no bread.”

Another thing that I have found is that intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn’t excel in anything in which I didn’t have an intense interest.

Another thing you have to do is have a lot of assiduity. I like that word because to me it means “Sit down on your ass until you do it.”

“If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.”