Richer, Wiser, Happier by William Green is an enjoyable and insightful read. Based on his personal interviews with the best investors of our time, the author shares with us the most valuable lessons they’ve learned and gives us a glimpse into how these super investors think.

This post is a summary of their insights, which are not limited just to investing, but can also help us improve our decision making in general.

Mohnish Pabrai

• Clone like crazy. 
• Hang out with people who are better than you. 
• Treat life as a game, not as a survival contest or a battle to the death. 
• Be in alignment with who you are; don’t do what you don’t want to do or what’s not right for you. 
• Live by an inner scorecard; don’t worry about what others think of you; don’t be defined by external validation.

Charlie Munger

• Take a simple idea and take it seriously.
• Conduct your life so that you can handle a fifty percent market decline with aplomb and grace.
• You have to play in a game where you’ve got some unusual talents. 
• Figure out a game where you have an advantage, and it has to be something that you’re deeply interested in.
• If you want to have a good partner, be a good partner.
• My theory of life is win-win.

John Templeton

• Beware of emotion: “Most people get led astray by emotions in investing. They get led astray by being excessively careless and optimistic when they have big profits, and by getting excessively pessimistic and too cautious when they have big losses.
• Beware of your own ignorance, which is “probably an even bigger problem than emotion. So many people buy something with the tiniest amount of information. They don’t really understand what it is that they’re buying.
• You should diversify broadly to protect yourself from your own fallibility.
• Successful investing requires patience.
• The best way to find bargains is to study whichever assets have performed most dismally in the past five years, then to assess whether the cause of those woes is temporary or permanent.
• One of the most important things as an investor is not to chase fads.

Howard Marks

Critical ideas that come up repeatedly

• The importance of admitting that we can’t predict or control the future.
• The benefits of studying the patterns of the past and using them as a rough guide to what could happen next.
• The inevitability that cycles will reverse and reckless excess will be punished.
• The possibility of turning cyclicality to our advantage by behaving countercyclically. 
• The need for humility, skepticism, and prudence in order to achieve long-term financial success in an uncertain world.
• Everything is impermanent.

Graham, Kahn, Buffett, Eveillard, and McLennan

• We need to respect uncertainty.
• To achieve resilience, it’s imperative to reduce or eliminate debt, avoid leverage, and beware of excessive expenses, all of which can make us dependent on the kindness of strangers.
• Instead of fixating on short-term gains or beating benchmarks, we should place greater emphasis on becoming shock resistant, avoiding ruin, and staying in the game.
• Beware of overconfidence and complacency.
• We should be keenly aware of our exposure to risk and should always require a margin of safety.

Joel Greenblatt

• You don’t need the optimal strategy. You need a sensible strategy that’s good enough
• Your strategy should be so simple and logical that you understand it, believe in it to your core, and can stick with it even in the difficult times when it no longer seems to work.
• You need to ask yourself whether you truly have the skills and temperament to beat the market.
• It’s important to remember that you can be a rich and successful investor without attempting to beat the market

Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria

• Pursue quality as a guiding principle in business, investing, and life.
• Focus on whatever has the longest shelf life
• One particular business model—scale economies shared—creates a virtuous cycle that can generate sustainable wealth over long periods. 
• It’s not necessary to behave unethically or unscrupulously to achieve spectacular success.
• In a world that’s increasingly geared toward short-termism and instant gratification, a tremendous advantage can be gained by those who move consistently in the opposite direction.

Laura Geritz and Paul Lountzis

• Focus almost exclusively on what you’re best at and what matters most to you. 
• Success derives from this fierce insistence on concentrating deeply in a relatively narrow area while disregarding distractions 

Tom Gayner

• Resounding victories tend to be the result of small, incremental advances and improvements sustained over long stretches of time.
• You don’t need to be extreme to achieve exceptional long-term results.
• You can only control the effort and the dedication and the giving of one hundred percent of yourself to the task at hand. And then whatever happens, happens.

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