Buffett and Munger on friendship · Transcript · BuffettMungerGPT

WarrenHow do you make lots of friends and get people to like you and work with you? Well, you know, I was pretty obnoxious when I was your age and asked a lot of impertinent questions. And not everybody liked me. And so the only way I could get the people to like me a little bit was to get very rich and very generous. That will work. People will see all kinds of virtues in you if they think you'll try to check. Yeah, the truth is, both Charlie and I were on the obnoxious side early on, but you shouldn't get a little smarter about human behavior as you get older. And I turned out to have some pretty good teachers as I went along in terms of what worked. I mean, I have looked at other people during my lifetime and had these wonderful teachers. They weren't teachers in the standard definition. But they were people I admired, and I thought to myself, why do I admire these people? And if I want to be admired myself, you know, why shouldn't I take on some of their qualities? So it's not a complicated proposition, you know, if you look around you at the people you like in your school, write down three or four things they do that make you like them, and then look around at the three or four people that turn you off and write down those qualities and decide that you're going to be a person you yourself would like, that you take on the qualities of the person on the left of. You're generous, you're friendly. You know, you accept things with good humor, you don't claim credit for things, you don't do, all of these things, and they're all possible to do. And if you like that in other people, people are going to like it than you. And if you find things that are kind of obnoxious, you're always late, and you're always claiming credit for more than you do, and you're kind of negative on everything, and you don't like those in other people. Get rid of them in yourself, and you'll find out it works pretty well. It really works in marriage. If you can change yourself instead of trying to change your spouse, that's the way. That's a good idea. Charlie has said the most important thing in selecting a marriage partner is that you don't look for intelligence or humor and character. It says you look for someone with low expectations.