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

Book Review: 3/5 Impact On Me (Book By Charles T. Munger)

Read more about the book here.

I rate the impact of this book 3 out of 5 on me. Much of Munger’s best-known advice is already on the Internet, so I had seen some of it before. The almanac format also made the overlap in his talks stand out: that repetition works for a speaker giving talks over the years, but as a reader going through the book it felt redundant.

Multidisciplinary thinking

He emphasized multidisciplinary thinking. I have heard this before and believed in it. If you are very good at A and very good at B, you become a unique person who is good at both. That can help you get ahead.

I am not so sure I still believe in it after trying entrepreneurship. You do not need to be multidisciplinary as an individual. You can be good at one thing and have a co-founder with the other skill. That is another good way to build the right founding team for a startup or in a bigger company. Knowing multiple things does not mean you are doing multiple things. You still have limited time. You can invest 40 or 80 hours a week to get really good at one thing, because each thing has so much depth nowadays.

Psychology and biases

His emphasis on psychology lined up with what my father had already stressed when I was in engineering. I took a few psychology courses then and later chose an MBA to keep learning how to work with people better. Munger covers many psychological biases, but that was not new to me, so it did not add much.