Warren Buffett is one of the wisest people of our time. Not just in business and investing but in how to live a fulfilled life.
I listen to his Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings on YouTube daily to make sure I have access to his counsel. The great part is the meetings also include Warren’s business partner Charlie Munger who is also a man full of wisdom and insight. I got this idea to listen to the annual meetings from billionaire Naveen Jain who also studies them.
Here’s a link to Berkshire Hathaway’s 2021 annual meeting on YouTube.
Here’s a link to Charlie Munger’s insightful book studied by top performers in business and life. It’s full of wit, wisdom, mental models, and some of his commencement speeches he gave at places like Harvard.
One nugget I recently picked out while listening to his annual meeting from 2000 was his strategy on how to take on and model the qualities of others you admire.
Here it is:
Pick out the person you admire.
Write down the reasons why you admire them.
Decide that you can have those same qualities. Qualities of personality, character, temperament can be emulated.
Start practicing emulating them in your life much like Benjamin Franklin did with his 13 virtues.
You can apply the reverse of it also.
Find the people with qualities you don’t like and practice not emulating them. If you do them already decide on a better quality to replace it.
It’s not complicated. Nothing can be more simple.
Decide on the qualities you find admirable and the great part is you’ll end up finding out the person you’d really like to admire is yourself.
Another note on this from Warren’s wise and witty business partner Charlie Munger is that you don’t limit yourself to the models who are living.
This is great because some people say they don’t have access to successful people who are living.
Some of the best models are dead and you have unlimited access to them by reading biographies.
One of my clients cleverly put up pictures of people he’d like to model in his home so he has their counsel and insight when he needs it without even having to intentionally think about it.
This is quite similar to Napoleon Hill’s “Invisible Counselor’s Technique” from his book Think and Grow Rich. He would use his imagination to get guidance from his counselor’s (people like Jesus, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci) to help him solve problems he was working on before going to sleep so his subconscious could work on it while he rested.
