Charlie Munger explains Warren Buffett’s extreme success

The Kunhardt Film Foundation has released on YouTube the full interview that they did with Charlie Munger for the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett.

Right at the beginning of it, Charlie explains the factors that he believes explain Buffett’s success as an investor:

Question: What makes Warren’s mind unique?

Munger: Well, there’s a big correlation between success in life and an early start. And Warren had a passion for doing well competitively, in getting money, as a little tiny child. And he just kept it.

Now, you add [to that] a very high IQ and a lot of energy.

And he got a flying start. He was an old Graham-Newman (a) follower, and he made a lot of money buying thinly-traded securities, that were incredibly cheap, statistically. And with small amounts of money — which is what he [was] working with — he could find enough of those to earn pretty high returns on capital year after year after year.