With thousands of others, I share admiration for Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger for what they built at Berkshire Hathaway, their commonsense approach to investing, and not the least, to the way they have lived their lives. Warren Buffet has always been the main public-facing persona of Berkshire, with Charlie Munger saying much less at their famous annual meetings but adding his own snippets of wit and wisdom.
In fact, this book is subtitled, The Essential Wit & Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. I bought the book prepublication and waited through a number of delays in the publishing date. I think they were planning to release this book on Charlie’s 100th birthday, but then he went and died at 99, screwing up their schedule!
The book starts with a couple of Forwards, including one by Warren Buffet, and then there are three chapters about Charlie and what he meant to people. But the bulk of the book is devoted to eleven talks that Charlie gave over the years to various groups. These have been gathered by the editor, Peter Kaufman, then revised by Charlie himself.
These talks were given to illustrious groups, such as commencement ceremonies at prestigious universities, various foundations, and Charlie’s Harvard Law School 50th Reunion Address. Charlie was very smart and very opinionated. But his manner of speaking and writing is not like what one sees in YouTube clips from the old Berkshire annual meetings in Omaha.
Part of the problem may be that Charlie was a lot smarter than I am, so I had trouble following his line of reasoning in many of the talks. He also used vocabulary with many words that are foreign to me. Again, this could be simply because he was a lot smarter than I am. But in some cases that wasn’t what tripped me up.
I’ll give you an example. He often in his writing talks about “Lollapalooza Effects.” I thought that Lollapalooza was a music festival, and indeed it is. It’s original meaning is “a person or thing that is particularly impressive or attractive.” The word originated in the late 19th century and has had little common usage in the last hundred years, except for the music festival. Charlie uses the term a lot. And I suspect there are other words he likes but are not in common usage.
Most of the eleven talks revolve around a method of thinking Charlie used, which used various psychological tendencies to explain behaviors. These various tendencies were used by Charlie as a framework for decision making in his life and business decision-making.
The written versions of his talks are pretty dense and not exactly what I was expecting from “The Essential Wit & Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.”
By the way, the title, “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” is a riff on Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. Charlie was a huge fan of Franklin.
As to my recommendation to you. Well, I was quite disappointed with the book. If you’re really a hard-core fan of Charlie Munger, then maybe. But I was a big fan and there was little joy in this book for me.
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