George Mack Profile picture
May 18, 2019 16 tweets 3 min read Read on X
The most VALUABLE piece of investing advice I ever received came from Warren Buffett.

THREAD...
Buffett gave a talk at University of Georgia.

He told the students to look around at their friends and answer the following question:

“If you could get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their lives, what friends would you INVEST in?”
Once you have the 2-3 friends that you’d invest in, explore WHY you’d invest in them.

What values do these individuals hold?

What habits do they engage in?
Here’s the values of friends that made me want to invest:

1. High agency / resourcefulness

2. Consistency

3. Give more than they take

4. Learning machines

5. Live on the edge of their comfort zones or creating a new project

6. Pay attention to small details
After doing this, Buffett suggests you look around at your friends again.

“If you could SHORT 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life, what friends would you choose?”
Again, once you have these friends in your mind - ask WHY you'd short them.

What values do they have that you'll think will harm them?

What negative habits do they engage in?
Here’s the values of friends that I’d SHORT:

1. Narcissism

2. Inconsistency

3. Arrogance

4. Dishonesty

5. External locus of control

6. Map knowledge / Know it alls
Once you these lists, you have finally answered one of life’s wooliest questions:

“What are my values?”

You have guiding principles you can look to embody.
You can extrapolate this further than just financial ROI.

You can look at your friends balance sheets for hapiness, relationships, fitness etc.

Who would you invest 10% in? Why?

Who would you short 10%? Why?

You can download the values you need for those areas too.
This exercise is so powerful because our identity isn’t involved.

“It is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.” - Daniel Kahneman
Emotion & Ego distort our reality.

It’s so easy to see when a friend should break up with their partner, quit their job or shut down their company.

Yet despite having more information on the subject than you, they still can’t see it.

Why?

Emotion & Ego (Identity)
The Buffett exercise is so powerful because it gives you the ability to view your human operating system in the same way everyone else will:

1. Objectively
2. Don’t care about you
3. Want to know what value you can provide
Self awareness has the Dunning-Kruger effect built into its software.

The most self aware people I know are aware that they lack self awareness.

The least self aware people I know are convinced they are self aware.
Buffett’s investment advice passes Peter Thiels test.

You know your friends better than ANYONE.

This means that you have a SECRET that the rest of the world doesn’t have about their values and habits.

This information gained is truly unique to everyone who applies it.
SUMMARY:

1. Treat your objective analysis of other people as the best form of self knowledge

2. Understand what values you'd invest in and what you would short in every area of life

3. The tactile knowledge of your friends is a secret as unique as your finger print
Talk about this idea and many more in the Modern Wisdom podcast I did with @ChrisWillx

YouTube 👇


Podcast 👇

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More from @george__mack

Mar 28
Underrated rule of thumb: Don't put another human on a pedestal.

Even the greats had human flaws:

1. ‍‍Steve Jobs delayed nine months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer for a carrot juice diet and acupuncture. Image
2. Mozart overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money. Image
3. Isaac Newton spent thirty years of his life writing 1 million words on alchemy.

Hidden for years by his heirs because they were too embarrassed to publish it. Image
Read 14 tweets
Mar 24
After 7 months of writing, I finished my essay!

I think agency might be the most important idea of the 21st century

highagency.com
High agency in a meme: Image
High agency in a moment: Image
Read 9 tweets
Mar 23
After 7 months, I finished my essay on high agency.

So I asked myself: "What's the most high agency way of promoting it?"

Last night, I took over the iconic Times Square in New York for $0.

Hilarious story... Image
I spent 7 months trying to simplify high agency in the essay:

Optimism = Glass is half full

Pessimism = Glass is half empty

High agency = You're a tap Image
When it came time to promote it, I used the high agency tricycle:

1. Clear thinking
2. Bias to action
3. Disagreeability

Like a tricycle, if you take away any of the wheels -- it stops working. Image
Read 17 tweets
Aug 12, 2024
"Most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75" - Benjamin Franklin

Why?

4 reasons and solutions: Image
Reason 1 - Milestones

0-25 is a well-designed video game.

You level up each year.

There are regular milestones as you go from infancy to school to entering the workforce.

You constantly feel like you're making progress -- and have reflective milestones.
After 25, it's a terribly designed video game.

Society places you on your own.

If you don't have the agency to design your own 25+ video game, the only milestones life will give you are the funerals of your loved ones -- followed by your own funeral.
Read 23 tweets
Jun 16, 2024
What idea do you think is true AND underpriced?

Here's mine: The most productive people turn life into a video game.

Let's go deep into this...Image
I had this red pill moment when I saw the following:

The laziest person I’ve ever met play a video game for 16 hours straight, 7 days per week.

My brain began to hurt: The laziest person I knew just did more focused work than I’d seen anyone ever achieve.
I’d hit level 100 of cognitive dissonance:

The laziest person in my life is also the hardest working person in my life?!

I needed a software update for my broken worldview:
I realised this person wasn’t lazy…

Instead, their reality was just a poorly designed video game.
Read 23 tweets
May 30, 2024
How to choose where to live and what locations to visit:

12 non-obvious thoughts:
1. The 3 big decisions: Where you live, what you do, and who you're with.

Location might be the most important one because the other 2 are often downstream of location.
2. Good rule of thumb for locations to avoid: What places has the most amount of sofa people? (People that drain your energy you need to lie down on a sofa to recharge)
Read 15 tweets

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