"To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
— Charlie Munger
To The Man With Only A
To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
About this quote
Munger used this hammer-and-nail analogy repeatedly throughout his career to describe what he called the "man with a hammer" tendency — a cognitive bias where a single tool or framework is over-applied to every problem. The saying appears in Poor Charlie's Almanack (2005) and was central to his advocacy for a "latticework of mental models" drawn from multiple disciplines. The underlying observation is often traced to Abraham Maslow (1966), but Munger popularized it in the investing world.
Source
Poor Charlie's Almanack, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (2005)
