Charlie Munger – Mental Models

About Charlie Munger

Charlie Thomas Munger was a famous investor and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. He was the most important partner of Warren Buffett, he became vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway in 1978. In 2023 he passed away at the age of 99, during his life he fulfilled a wide variety of roles. (Wikipedia, 2025) Warren and Charlie worked closely together for more than four decades to grow Berkshire Hathaway into one of the most known holding companies among investors. (Investopedia, 2025)

Every year he would speak together with Warren Buffett on the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder meeting, to share his views on actual developments. This is how I got acquainted with Charlie and his ideas. Sometimes he would shed light on the fact he uses mental models for decision making in life, business and investing. This prompted me to further research his philosophy and use of mental models. The mental models are not strictly formulated and written down by him in a single place, but are disseminated throughout his book: Poor Charlies Almanack (as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases) and various lectures he gave. Such as his lecture at the Marshall School of Business: Link to lecture

Mental Models

Mental Models are cognitive tools to understand the world around us and make effective decisions. The models are based on a variety of disciplines, this will help to avoid biases while interpreting situations. Using a broad range of models can make you are more complete thinker because you use concepts from many fields.

Latticework of Mental Models

Charlie would call a collection of mental models a “Latticework of Mental Models” where we can use a variety of ideas from multiple disciplines to solve problems. Because of this “Swiss Army Knife” approach we always have a mental tool or combination of tools to face situations. That is why I think it could be interesting and useful to further explore the contents of these mental models. What can we learn from them? Actually you could say he created a philosophy in his own right that leans on a large collection of mental models. Below you can find QuikTakes written about Charlie Mungers mental models, these are short blog posts where we explore the core of every mental model and how you could use it.

QuickTakes: Charlie Munger – Mental Models

Blog Posts in the category Charlie Munger – Mental Models will appear below here, sorted on publishing date.

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