All I Want to Know Is Where I'm Going to Die So I'll Never Go There
Dialogue form; Munger's inversion habit worked through systematically.
Summary
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.
Key takeaways 7
- Avoiding known categories of error produces better long-run results than attempting to identify exceptional opportunities.
- Inversion, meaning asking what would guarantee failure and avoiding it, is more tractable than asking what would produce success.
- The most common investment mistake is paying a price that requires everything to go right.
- Leverage converts a survivable mistake into a permanent one, which is why it is the error that matters most.
- Extrapolating recent growth or profitability into the future is the assumption behind most overpayment.
- Activity in a portfolio correlates with cost and error rather than with return.
- A business you cannot explain simply is one where your assessment of the risks is probably wrong.
Who should read it
Investors who want Munger and Buffett's error-avoidance material compressed into one short volume, if they have not already read the primary sources.
About Peter Bevelin
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.
Where it sits in the reference 3
Similar books 6
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.
