Combine mental models
Combine ideas from different disciplines to see important causes that a single professional perspective can miss.
Perimeter Books
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Perimeter Books / Decision-making
Poor Charlie’s Almanack
Charles T. Munger · edited by Peter D. Kaufman
A collection of Munger’s talks and ideas on judgment, business, and investing.
2023 · Abridged hardcover
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Stripe Press2023 · selected edition
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Inside the book
What you’ll find inside.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack gathers eleven talks that reveal how Charlie Munger connected investing with the wider task of thinking well. Edited by Peter D. Kaufman, it ranges across psychology, business, science, and ethics, repeatedly asking why intelligent people make avoidable mistakes. Munger argues that a narrow specialty is insufficient preparation for messy real decisions: readers need ideas from several disciplines and the discipline to notice when incentives or emotion distort their judgment. Stripe Press’s 2023 abridged edition adds a foreword by John Collison. Its appeal is the accumulation of practical mental habits, delivered in Munger’s direct, often mischievous voice.
Who it’s for
Investors, operators, and curious generalists who want to improve judgment by studying how thinking goes wrong.
Ideas to examine
Take these into your reading.
Work backward
Work backward from an unwanted outcome to identify the behaviors and conditions that would produce it.
Follow the incentives
Examine incentives before assuming that intelligence or good intentions will lead people to sound decisions.
Watch for reinforcing biases
Look for several psychological biases reinforcing one another, because their combined effect can overwhelm ordinary judgment.
Your research notebook
Questions worth keeping.
- Which decision would look different if you first listed the ways it could fail?
- Where do incentives in your work reward confident answers more than accurate ones?
Save this title to add your own notes and reading progress.
The ideas, in conversation
Hear from the author.
Conversations are produced by the linked publishers and may cover the author’s broader work.
Go back to the evidence
Connect the book to your research.
Compare an investment argument with a competing view, and keep a record of the assumptions that would change your mind.
Community
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Investor interviews and business discussions from the show formerly called We Study Billionaires.
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