Keep the question attached to Munger’s answer
A Munger Q&A is more useful when the question and his qualifications survive the clip. I would apply that discipline before turning any famous answer into operating advice.
TL;DR: I would save the question with the answer whenever a famous person’s advice feels immediately reusable. This Charlie Munger Q&A recording is useful for that habit. One exchange about books becomes more interesting when you retain his hesitation instead of extracting a reading slogan.
Asked for book recommendations, Munger describes receiving more books than he can read, skimming many of them and doubting whether he is still the best person to recommend them. He contrasts that with reading fewer books more carefully earlier in his life. The exchange also appears in a transcript of the 2020 Daily Journal meeting, on page 20 of the PDF.
The useful detail is the qualification. A person known for reading is describing a limit to his current recommendation, rather than handing out a universal rule for everyone else’s reading volume.
That is easy to lose in a clip. “Read fewer books” is portable. A situated answer about attention, changed habits and imperfect advice asks more of the reader.
Make advice answer the original problem
For a practical exercise, I would take one piece of advice a team repeats and reconstruct the question it is supposed to answer. Consider the hypothetical instruction to “move faster.”
If the problem is waiting a week for a reversible decision, reducing approval delays may help. If the problem is shipping defects because nobody understands an unfamiliar system, another speed mandate could make things worse. The words are identical; the diagnosis is different.
I would write the original question, the conditions under which the answer makes sense, and one condition that would make me choose differently. Then I would ask whether our current situation actually resembles that setting. The answer has to survive that comparison before it becomes an operating rule.
This is also how I would use the book exchange. Rather than copy a famous person’s reading pace, choose a reason for reading: understand a difficult argument, compare alternatives or prepare for a decision. Judge the reading practice against that purpose. A skim and a careful reread can both be appropriate.
Preserve the speaker’s uncertainty
A good source note should allow the original speaker to be less certain than the person sharing them. Keep the hesitation when it changes the claim. Keep the scope when it limits the recommendation. Keep the question when it explains why the answer was given.
The saved recording contains a range of historical opinions and starts within a longer event. It should not be labelled as Munger’s prepared psychological-misjudgment speech. Nor does this reading establish that his advice works in every organisation. The application here is about how to handle advice, not an endorsement of every position in the session.
My rule would make a quote collection smaller and more useful. Each retained answer would have a job, a context and a reason it could fail.
The question and the qualification are part of the advice; carry both into the decision you are making.
