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Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s long-time partner at Berkshire Hathaway. Content to being the lesser known of the two, Munger is no less impressive. Bill Gates says that Charlie Munger “is truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered,” and Buffett calls him the ideal partner who is “both smarter and wiser.”
Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a collection of Charlie Munger’s best advice given over 30 years, in the form of 11 speeches given as commencement addresses and roundtable talks. He covers a wide range of topics, including rationality and decision making, investing, and how to live a good life.
When asked to describe himself in one word, Charlie Munger chose “rational.” He knows he’s subject to the same biases affecting all other humans, and he’s trained himself to recognize when the biases are active and how to limit their damage.
If you want to make better decisions, you need to seek truth—what is really happening in the world, not what you want to believe is happening. Recognizing the truth is often painful—it may go against your prior beliefs or desires, but recognizing reality is better than deluding yourself.
Third, after considering other viewpoints, you should readily change your mind. Be willing to destroy your favorite ideas. Munger says that any year he doesn’t destroy one of his beloved ideas is a wasted year.
Social proof bias is the tendency to believe what others believe, to improve social cohesion. This causes humans to think like sheep, even if the ideas they believe are wrong. Practicing contrary thinking invites new ideas that might be more correct than what everyone else thinks.
Munger and Buffett practice this regularly in their financial management. If you adopt the same investment practices as everyone else, you can by definition only get average returns. To achieve outstanding returns, you need to think differently from the crowd.