Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life

CHAPTER ONE
The Man Who Cloned Warren Buffett
How to succeed by shamelessly borrowing other
people’s best ideas
A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those
who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savor
of it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli
I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever gured out.
I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s
that smart.
—Charlie Munger
It’s 7:00 a.m. on Christmas Day. Mohnish Pabrai steps into a minivan in
Mumbai as the sun rises in the smoggy sky. We drive for hours along the western
coast of India toward a territory called Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Our driver
intermittently executes terrifying maneuvers, swerving wildly between trucks
and buses. I close my eyes and grimace in horror as horns blare on all sides.
Pabrai, who grew up in India before moving to the United States for college,
smiles serenely, always calm in the presence of risk. Still, he concedes, “The
accident rate in India is high.”
It’s a riveting drive, full of mind-bending sights. At one point, we pass a
plump man by the side of the road who’s stacking bricks on top of a skinny
woman’s head so she can carry them. As we drive deeper into the countryside,
we see squat huts covered with grass—structures that seem to belong to another
millennium. Finally, we reach our destination: a rural high school called JNV
Silvassa.
Pabrai, one of the preeminent investors of his generation, has traveled here
from his home in Irvine, California, to visit forty teenage girls. They are part of a
program run by his charitable foundation, Dakshana, which educates gifted
children from disadvantaged families across India. Dakshana is providing these
girls with two years of free schooling to prepare them for the infamously dicult
entrance exam to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), a group of elite
engineering colleges whose graduates are coveted by companies such as
Microsoft and Google.
More than a million students apply to IIT each year, and less than 2 percent
are accepted. But Dakshana has cracked the code. Over twelve years, 2,146
Dakshana scholars have won places at IIT—an acceptance rate of 62 percent.
Pabrai views Dakshana (a Sanskrit word meaning “gift”) as a means of uplifting
the most underprivileged segments of Indian society. Most Dakshana scholars
come from rural families that survive on less than $2 a day. Many belong to lower
castes, including “untouchables,” who have suered centuries of discrimination.
Whenever Pabrai visits a Dakshana classroom, he breaks the ice by posing the
same mathematical problem. Everyone who has solved it has subsequently won a
place at IIT, so it’s a useful way to gauge the talent in the room. The question is
so hard that almost nobody gets it right, and he expects none of the Silvassa
students to meet the challenge. Nonetheless, he writes the problem in chalk on
the blackboard at the front of the classroom: n is a prime number ≥5. Prove that
n2
-1 is always divisible by 24. Then he leans back in a imsy plastic chair while
the girls attempt to divine the answer.
I wonder what they make of this
amboyant, larger-than-life creature—a tall, burly, balding moneyman with a
luxuriant mustache, who’s dressed in a Dakshana sweatshirt and pink jeans.
After ten minutes, Pabrai asks, “Is anyone close?” A fteen-year-old girl
named Alisa says, “Sir, it’s only a theory.” Her tentativeness instills no
condence, but Pabrai invites her to the front of the classroom to show him her
solution. She hands him a sheet of white paper and stands meekly before him,
head bowed, awaiting judgment. Above her, a sign on the wall says, in

Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life