How to Get Rich SO Fast That People Will Think You’re Cheating
LITTLE BIT BETTER · 12:31 · the shameless-cloner thesis (Mohnish Pabrai → Warren Buffett) applied to businesses and channels · watch
Original placeholder title was “How to Get Rich Fast (And Why Most People Stay Poor)” — corrected to the actual fetched video title.
The Pabrai story
- Mohnish Pabrai calls himself a shameless cloner — copied Warren Buffett’s day, business structure, and decision-making for decades without ever meeting him, and made ~$154M from it. His answer to why more people don’t clone: “They are not as shameless as me. They have more ego.”
- Origin: sitting in Heathrow, picked up One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch. Read Buffett was making 31%/year for 40+ years (most investors <10%). One thought: what if I just copy exactly what he does? Not smarter, not improved — copied.
- Then studied Buffett like a life’s work: everything written, every interview, annual meetings for 20+ years, reading 5–6 hrs/day, working alone.
- 2007: paid $650K at Buffett’s charity lunch auction with a friend. Framed as Guru Dakshina — a Hindu tradition of gifting your teacher when the education is complete. Buffett had turned him from engineer into millionaire without knowing he existed.
The two ways ego kills cloning
- The originality trap — school teaches copying = cheating. But almost every successful person started by copying; they just don’t advertise it. Sam Walton walked competitor stores with a notepad writing down layouts and shelf arrangements — called it “the best part of the job.”
- Toe-dipping — trying it for a week then quitting. Pabrai: “These damn humans hear something and say ‘Good idea, maybe I will use it.’ That does not work. You have to go 10,000% or nothing.”
Cloning ≠ mindless copying
- Pabrai cloned from multiple sources: Buffett for investing, Munger for thinking, Graham for principles, philosophers for life decisions.
- Combining pieces no one else combined is what made him original: “I have no original ideas. Everything is cloned” — yet nobody assembled them his way.
The creator example
A friend’s short-form recipe channel: polished, well-edited, but stuck. The top channel in her niche did the opposite of her instincts — no subtitles, no music, recipe never on screen, ~30s videos, only proven-view topics. Those choices weren’t accidents; the data had already rejected subtitles/music/overlays. Her friend reasons: “I want to be useful and original.”
Result of cloning instead: within 3 months one video hit 100K views, another passed half a million. Only after mastering the rules did she start experimenting.
Barber analogy: nobody walks into a barbershop day one insisting on their own technique — you stand behind the best barber and copy grip, wrist motion, how they talk to customers, then experiment once your hands understand the craft. But people starting channels/businesses skip exactly this step.
How to clone (practical steps)
- Find your Buffett — the ONE best performer in your niche. Pabrai didn’t sample five investors; he picked one and went all-in before branching out.
- Go deep, not surface — read everything, attend everything, study how they think and the principles behind decisions. Not a summary of their tactics.
- Clone the boring parts — success isn’t one golden insight, it’s ~1,000 small stacked decisions: morning structure, distraction handling, time protection. Like the gym: you can’t do only the fun exercises.
- Then adjust — experimentation is earned after mastering the whole system.
Closing question to ask yourself: “Am I copying what already works, or trying to be original before I’ve mastered the basics?”