During this interview with RWH, Joel Greenblatt discusses the dangers of brilliant investors becoming isolated and ignoring feedback. He and his business partner Rob are a successful investment team due to their complementary skills and willingness to challenge each other’s ideas. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Greenblatt: I think I told you I consider myself an average analyst when you’re looking at businesses. And Rob is one of the best I’ve ever seen, and cuts to the heart of matters very quickly. And since we’re only going for truth that saves a lot of time, and so it’s just worked out incredibly well.
And I think we would have made many more mistakes apart than together.
I think what I’ve noticed that happens to some of the most brilliant investors is since they’re right most of the time, and they probably could do better than anybody else, they… some of them stop listening to other people.
Even when they say hey hey you’re forgetting this thing, there’s no one there that they’ll listen to.
And I have that with Rob and Rob has that with me. We know that we’re not gonna just go along.
We’re gonna say hey that doesn’t make sense for these reasons, so you got to explain this to me before I feel comfortable with that.
And if you see some people who have had a great career and have done very well sometimes they make mistakes that you can’t even fathom because they don’t have someone to bounce ideas off of.
To tell them that they’re wrong. Tell them they’re wearing no clothes when they’re not, and just because they’ve been successful over such a long period of time.
You can watch the entire discussion here:
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