Is the written wisdom of a successful investor magical?

Poor Charlie’s Alamnack, is a collection of the talks and speeches of Charles T. Munger, who is considered as one of the most successful investors in the world.  He was the vice chairman to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. The book contains his wit and wisdom with advice for investors, entrepreneurs, and businesses.

The book also praises him a lot to show how wise he is.  There are ideas in the book worth learning for most people in the world. However, the book does not always shares its ideas effectively, especially for people my age. 

This book includes a description of the life of Charles T. Munger for the first 3 chapters, from when he was a little child to the time that he has been successful in the stock market and he has had a family.

There are also sections where other people, his colleagues, friends, and family members,  evaluate him.

One impressive idea in this section is that he learned his big family can survive the worst economic collapse in American history through supporting each other. This is shown through a series of stories of how his family members helped each other during the Great Depression to make them live well in such a period.

The following four  chapters are Charle’s methods used, and are a collection of his actual speeches and talks, and some notations to some articles and reports.

The main ideas here are “use multiple models practically”, “do right, moral things”, “keep learning” and “catch the chance”. I like his point of view of learning, “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”

There are more elaborations of the benefits of these qualities. It also goes into great detail in terms of strategies to investigate and succeed in the stock market.

 The language used is quite easy to understand. Unquestionably, some of the values it promotes are good ideas for anyone to put to use.

There are parts of the book that seemed repetitive and it could have been edited to be shorter and more focused.

I once read a similar book called  The Wisdom of Laotse by Lin Yutang. It shares the actual philosophy of Taoism, Laotse is the representative of Taoism who was Chinese and lived more than 2,000 years ago. It ssuggests people be natural and compassionate.

Most of that book is about the explanation of some ancient beliefs in Taoism.  The Wisdom of Laotse is about an awareness of life that can be used to overcome psychological pain. Poor Charlie’s Alamnack is about the improvement of ourselves, particularly in terms of finance.

I am reading Poor Charlie’s for the second time and I find that I have gotten some different thoughts compared with the first time I read it.

If you are interested in self improvement and finance, this book has some slow moments and is long and expensive, but is worth your time and money for self improvement.