All I Want to Know Is Where I'm Going to Die So I'll Never Go There

Bevelin, who also wrote Seeking Wisdom, constructed this as a dialogue between a fictional investor, a character based on Charlie Munger, and a character based on Warren Buffett, built almost entirely from quotations from their letters, speeches and interviews, with additional material from other sources. The title comes from a remark of Munger's about inversion.

The organising idea is that avoiding error produces better results than pursuing brilliance. The dialogue works through categories of mistake: paying too much, misjudging management, misunderstanding a business's economics, extrapolating recent results, confusing activity with progress, using excessive leverage, relying on forecasts, and following the crowd. In each case the method is inversion, meaning to ask what would guarantee a bad outcome and then avoid those things, rather than asking what would produce a good one.

The form is unusual. Bevelin does not paraphrase; he assembles quotations into a conversation, with attribution in the margins. This gives the material authority and also makes it repetitive, since Buffett and Munger have made the same points many times.

The book adds no analysis of its own. It is a compilation, and everything in it exists in the source material, most of which is publicly available. Its use is as a compressed reference on error avoidance for someone who does not want to read forty years of shareholder letters. Readers who have already read Poor Charlie's Almanack and the Berkshire letters will find little new.

Swedish investor and author who assembles the psychology, physics and biology behind Charlie Munger's approach to thinking.

Seeking Wisdom collects the misjudgement patterns, cross-disciplinary principles and checklists underlying Munger's method, sourced back to Darwin, Feynman, Munger and Buffett with citations throughout. The Sherlock Holmes volume drills the same procedure as observation and inference practice.