 Among countless numbers of great investors out there, if there's only one principle that you can clone from one of them, what would that be? I asked bestselling author William Green this question during our recent interview, and I was shocked by his answer. In this video, William Green is going to review to you the most important principle that he himself learned after spending countless hours digging into the best brands in the investment world. I recently had the honor to be able to have this very exclusive interview, William Green, on to my channel. During this one and a half hour closed door interview, William shared many golden principles to help us not just become successful investors, but also excel in different parts of our lives. To help you to better comprehend the depth of this interview, I've decided to break it down into different parts, with each episode staticating to one important theme. During the last interview, William shared the most important lesson that he himself learned from Charlie Munger. And today, we're going to delve into the one timeless principles that he himself want to clone from after interviewing so many brilliant investors all over the world. So if you don't want to miss out on the future episodes, make sure you hit the like and subscribe button and hit the notification bell right now to get the future updates. Without further ado, let's dive in. Because you interview so many great investors, which one quality if you have only one choice, which one would you really want to clone? The value that is so important to you? Well, it depends whether you're asking surely about investing or about life. And so I can give you both answers, really. So take a couple of different investors in the book. Take someone like an Ed Thorpe in the book, who's at the start of the book, who might just be the smartest guy in the book, an extraordinarily brilliant guy. So Ed is just wildly rational, right? Like Ed, for example, said, I don't I would never go to a casino. He said, you know, I don't play games that I can't win. And so unless I have an edge, I'm not going to play. So then when he starts to go to the casino, he's like, he figures out how to win at Blackjack by counting cards. He was the first guy to figure out how to count cards. Then he figures out how to win at Roulette by with a legendary guy called Claude Shannon from MIT. They made the first, you know, wearable computer that he could activate with the big toe in his shoe. So he can see how fast the rotor wheel and the ball are going. So so he's putting the odds in his favor. So to be a successful investor, that kind of rationality, that fierce rationality, to be able to say, I only play games where I have an advantage, you know, to be unemotional about it, not to get carried away by your emotions. That's that's a hugely powerful characteristic, that kind of rationality not being driven by your emotions, not being driven by your fear of missing out or your jealousy or or your greed or anything like that. That's hugely important. But then I didn't want to write this book and have people think, oh, it's all just about getting as rich as possible. Because then I'm faced with this difficult issue that so many of the people in the investment world have terrible lives. I mean, I was talking to a famous investor the other day, just privately on Friday as friends. And he said to me, he starts talking to me in kind of slightly crude, expletive, filled sentences that I won't repeat about just how awful the private lives of these famous investors he's friends with are. And he talks, he talked about one multibillionaire who you'd have heard of, who's a close friend of his. And he's like, he said, he was such an asshole or something like that. I'm sorry, a pilot is for the, his English is actually worse. And he's and he said, you know, and amazingly over the last 10 years, he's just become a much better human being. But that to me, that's really important, right? So you have to start to say, OK, so there's, there's making lots of money and you want to clone the rationality and the being able to play games that you're going to win and and being a compounding, you know, compounding wisdom and knowledge and all of that. But you also want a successful life. And so I was looking in the book and thinking, well, who actually has a successful life? And so I ended the book by writing about this guy, Arnold Vandenberg, who I said, this is not the most successful investor in the world. But he's the most successful human being I've ever encountered in the investing world. And that's that's an idea really worth cloning to start to say, OK, so why is his life so successful? Because he started with the most terrible odds against him. I mean, this is this is the guy who grew up in the Holocaust, grew up in hiding, thought that his his mom sent him to an orphanage in in Holland to be in hiding because she didn't want him. So he had tremendous sense of abandonment. You know, he had 39 members of his family were killed by the Nazis. So he was full of anger and rage. And he barely made it through high school because, you know, he he was so malnourished and he couldn't concentrate. He was full of rage. And yet he's become just the most lovely human being, like full of kindness and love and decency. And so part of what I wanted to explore there, I'm never going to be as smart as Charlie Munger or Ed Thorpe. But when I look at Arnold Vandenberg, there are things in the way that he approaches life that I can clone. And so, for example, one of the things that's just really striking to me is he spends his whole time trying to help people just to an unbelievable degree. I mean, I have a trampoline outside that I'm ashamed to say. I I've I've given to my neighbors, kids instead of using myself. But Arnold sent it to me because he was worried that I was too slothful and that I needed to exercise more. I have dozens of books here from him. And likewise, I mean, I've sent him many books over the years. And I mean, I remember him once. He didn't even remember this when I told him this story. I remember once when I was interviewing him for the book, I've interviewed him so many times to the book. I went and spent two and a half days with him. He'd been in a in a queue in some store. And there's a I guess he was getting his hearing aid fix. He's in his eighties now. And there was a young woman in the store who was talking to someone explained that she was about to leave Texas for the very first time in her life because they think a cousin of hers or something like that was graduating from the Marine Corps or something. And she was going to go to this celebration. And Arnold takes out a hundred dollar bill and says, I'd like to give you this so you can go out with your cousin. And she's like, I, you know, I don't know you. I can't accept this. And he's like, no, no, you don't understand how much pleasure it would give me to know that you could do this with your with your relative. And so this is just like a standard piece of behavior from him, where just the joy he gets out of these little things out of making sure that somebody else is going to be happy. And that's a very cloneable thing to know that you want to be taking care of others to know, you know, and the other thing that's also very cloneable, it's very, very important from Arnold is he took control of his inner landscape. And so you think of, so, I mean, I told you before he was full of rage, right? You know, I mean, you can imagine if you've lost 39 members of your family, he'd been through hell. And yet at a certain point he discovered self hypnosis and he starts to transform his thinking. And he would walk around every time he had a negative thought, he would say things like, no, I'm a loving person, or he would say to himself over and over again, even now in his 80s, when he has a negative thought, he'll say something like every day in every way, I'm getting better and better. So he's replacing his negative thoughts with positive thoughts. And when I was young, I would have thought this was really pure aisle. I would have thought, you know, I mean, I was educated and eaten an Oxford and Columbia, and I had this classic liberal education, human arts, humanities education, where everything was about the intellect. And I thought it was almost like a badge of honor to be a little bit depressed, very cerebral to assume everything was going to hell. I mean, literally, you know, my inner monologue, I would, I would quote this amazing poem from the V8s who said, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere Hanukkah is loosed upon the world. And that was my kind of mental view, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. And it's like, that's just not a very useful way of thinking of things. And in some ways, it's true, things fall apart, like there is impermanence. But I also have become much more optimistic over the years, weirdly, much more positive over the years, much happier over the years. And I think it's a reflection of the fact that you do have to take control of your inner landscape, you have to take responsibility for for your thoughts and your behavior. And so I'm in this weird position where I started this book, really wanting to make people richer and then gradually starting to think, well, what has been rich mean? I mean, if you're, if you're rich financially, but you're poor in relationships or you're poor in terms of equanimity, I have a friend who's a very well known investor who, you know, I know was suicidal, not that long ago, is someone who's got, you know, more money than, you know, almost anyone we know. I mean, this is a lovely human being. I mean, I, that's hell to go through that. And so, so to me, I, this idea of, of choosing what you clone and deciding, well, if I'm just cloning the stuff about getting rich, I'm missing really the most important part of this goal. And so I've got to find habits that compound. I want to take the principle of compounding from these great investors. So it's very important for me to be compounding money, but it's also important for me to be compounding good habits that are going to add up in some extraordinarily powerful way over time. And so you want to start to think about, so what are the habits that are going to give me peace of mind? What are the habits that are going to give me good relationships? What are the, what are the habits that are going to allow me to, to tame my mind that the extraordinary Buddhist teacher I met said to me at one point, a friend of mine was translating from Tibetan. She said to me, the, the greatest richness is a tamed mind, the greatest wealth is a tamed mind. And it's like, yeah, yeah, if I, if I'm walking around every yesterday, for some reason, I was incredibly bad tempered in the afternoon, irritable. And if I'm walking around in that kind of huff, I'm poor. It doesn't matter, you know, that I'm surrounded by books and, you know, and get to do work I like. And I'm, you know, financially okay. Thank God. It's like, I'm poor if I'm walking around in that kind of temper. I know there's a long winded answer, but I think this is hugely important. Pick, pick the things that you want to clone that are going to make you rich in the broadest sense. So yes, you want to be living within your means. Yes, you want to be saving. Yes, you want to be investing for the long term. Yes, you don't want to be emotional and be driven by greed and fear and stupid emotions that are going to get you in trouble. But clone the things that are really valuable. Look at the people that you admire around you, the investors, the business people and think, you know, I don't have to clone every aspect of it. Let me clone, let me clone the best qualities from each of these people. And so, you know, when Monish Pabrai asked Charlie Munger what he thought of my book and he took this lovely video of him in his home and and I tried to say, oh, yeah, it's a great book, great book, love the book. And and Monish said, and what's the most striking lesson from it? And he said, how many of us ended up divorced or broken relationships? And he said, it makes sense because it's so all consuming the game that we neglected our spouses. Like, why would you want to clone the thing that leads to broken relationships? You know, so so they didn't pay enough attention in many cases to the people they loved most. So I end up focusing also a lot on people like Tom Ganner or Nick Sleep who who've had really good relationships as well as being really successful. So so to look look for those qualities that bring peace of mind, rich relationships, that this this broader sense of abundance. After watching this episode, I also came to realize that when it comes to being rich in life, it's not just about wealth accumulation, but also about the relationship and the kindness that you can cultivate throughout your life. And the more I think about it, the more I feel that for those truly successful people, what they truly want to focus on at the end of the day is relationship. If those successful investors after experiencing all this realize that that should be the ultimate focus, it leaves off some clues what exactly can we do to start cultivating beautiful relationship every day in our life. And that's why this book, Richer, Wiser, Happier is one of the most insightful and unique investment book that I have ever read. In fact, Charlie Munger said this is one of the best investment book that he has ever read. And William also shared that he felt very honored to be able to be invited to this special Zoom breakfast together with Charlie Munger because he learned so much during that very exclusive breakfast discussion. Are you curious to find out what did William Green learn? If so, comment discussion down below and make sure to hit the like, subscribe as well as the notification bell button so that when the next video is released, you will be immediately notified. While waiting for the next video, if you also want to learn more from William Green, then make sure to go and get this book by the link below and also check out his podcast, Richer, Wiser, Happier where he shared a lot more additional insights with many brilliant investors. Lastly, do join my Telegram channel as well so that you can get additional stock and investment updates. With that, I will see you in the next video. Aligato.