Warren Buffett’s Rule For Surrounding Yourself With Top 1% People

TL;DR

Warren Buffett says he is useless at figuring people out in a quick setting, so he identifies only 3-4 exceptional people and 3-4 toxic ones, then excludes the remaining 92% he cannot evaluate. He advocates being a harsh grader because including a substandard person is costly, while excluding a potentially good person has low cost given infinite humans.

Key insights

• Buffett claims he cannot judge 92 out of 100 people in a brief meeting; he only identifies a few exceptional and a few toxic individuals, and treats the rest as useless by excluding them.
• Loyalty to longstanding but flawed friendships is a common mistake that drags people down; the gravitational pull of one’s social circle determines improvement or decline.
• The speaker deliberately built relationships with Charlie Munger’s friends because Munger had already done the filtering — a shortcut to accessing top 0.1% humans.