Chapters

• A Portrait of Charles T. Munger
• Eleven Talks by Charlie Munger
• Remember: The Children on Charlie
• The Munger Approach to Life, Learning and Decision-Making

Extracted Knowledge

• Books suggested in Poor Charlie's Almanack
• Economics and Investing Knowledge in Poor Charlie's Almanack
• Mental Models in Poor Charlie's Almanack
• psychological tendencies in Poor Charlie's Almanack
• Quotes from Poor Charlie's Almanack
• Thinking Tools in Poor Charlie's Almanack
• Virtues and Vice in Poor Charlie's Almanack

Summary

Poor Charlie's Almanack is a non-fiction guide to living and thinking well. It is organized in eleven speeches given by Munger over the years with some minor commentary. There are also three chapters which act as a biographical and contextual introduction.

The talks cover many of the same ideas and lessons from different angles and emphasis. You can see the various topics woven throughout the speeches from the Extracted Knowledge from Poor Charlie's Almanack notes.

The primary emphasis in the book is Munger's suggested approach to self education and to navigating complex problems. That is, a multidisciplinary education which takes the most fundamental ideas from all major disciplines and organized these ideas into a checklist to be used in thinking about complex problems. This served Munger will in analyzing businesses for investment. Perhaps Charlie described it here, with some additional details taken from the method used to train professional pilots:

we need ... to have multidisciplinary coverage of immense amplitude, with all needed skills raised to an ever-maintained practice-based fluency, including considerable power of synthesis at boundaries between disciplines, with the highest fluency levels being achieved where they are most needed, with forward and reverse thinking techniques being employed in a manner reminding one of inversion in algebra, and with "checklist" routines being a permanent part of the knowledge system

Other ideas present throughout include moral views and examples, virtue and vice effects, investment strategy, and specific mental models and thinking tools (particularly from psychology).

Ultimately, Charlie favors broad education and using fundamental ideas and human psychology to understand the world. Charlie considers self education to be a moral issue, and posits that we are morally culpable for the outcomes of our actions, including second order outcomes. Chalie recognizes certain paradoxes in life (envy as a necessary aspect of healthy economy), but points out many virtue and vice effects that favor good behavior out of self interest.