50 Books That Stayed With Me: 5 of 50
5 out of 50
Here’s part five of the series, 50 Books That Stayed With Me. Without any further ado, let’s get to it.
Seeking Wisdom From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin
Bevelin’s book isn’t easy to categorize. It’s part psychology, part biology, part finance, part philosophy digest. But really, it’s full of mental models. Patterns of thinking and traps to avoid, stitched together from Darwin, Munger, Buffett, and a few hundred other thinkers you’ve probably heard of (and many you haven’t).
If you’ve read Thinking, Fast and Slow, Behave, or Fooled by Randomness, many of this will feel familiar. But even then, I don’t think there’s a better distillation of big ideas in one place.
It starts with biology. Not in the abstract, academic sense, but in a very practical one. Bevelin reminds us that our brains evolved for survival, not for truth. We're walking around with hardware designed for the African savannah, trying to navigate modern complexity. This evolutionary mismatch shows up everywhere: in our overreactions, our biases, our faulty memories, and our compulsive need for stories, even when the data says otherwise.
From there, the book dives into psychological misjudgments. Like dozens of them. Think confirmation bias, social proof, authority bias, loss aversion, and more. These aren’t just academic terms; Bevelin shows how they operate in the real world. In markets, in boardrooms, in everyday decisions. He doesn’t just list them, either. He weaves them into examples, anecdotes, and quotes that make the abstract tangible.
By the time you turn the last page, you realize the book isn’t really about Darwin or Munger at all. It’s about learning to see the world a little more clearly, knowing the limits of your own mind, and building a latticework of ideas sturdy enough to hold up under uncertainty.
It’s the kind of book you don’t just read, you revisit, with a pen in hand, every few years. Because the traps don’t go away, but your ability to sidestep them can get better. (At least I hope so)
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.