Charlie Munger, Unplugged

Q: How much time do you spend reading in a typical day?

Charlie: Oh, it’s huge. I read myself to sleep every night. I read enormously. I like doing it. Not only that, what I found very early in life was that once I learned to read and handle elementary math, I really didn’t need professors or anything. I could figure out almost anything I wanted better from the written material than from having some professor tell it to me, because he’d be going too fast or too slow or telling me something I already knew or didn’t want to know. And so of course I like doing it by reading.

You look at [Andrew] Carnegie and [Benjamin] Franklin, they had a few years of primary school, they learned everything by themselves by reading. Whatever they needed, they just learned. It’s not that hard. Imagine educating yourself by firelight, no lamps, no electricity, after a day’s brutal work. Our ancestors had it tough.

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