"It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction"
About this Quote
The intent is practical, even a little ruthless. “Better than you” isn’t about admiration from afar; it’s about proximity, repetition, and friction. He’s telling you to treat your social circle like an investment portfolio: don’t diversify into chaos, don’t chase charisma, don’t confuse fun with compounding. The line “you’ll drift” is the tell. It assumes behavior change isn’t mostly willpower; it’s osmosis. You become what gets normalized.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two American myths: that individual grit is the whole story, and that networking is primarily transactional. Buffett’s version of “associates” is less LinkedIn and more ethics-by-environment. He’s not advising you to collect powerful friends; he’s advising you to borrow their standards.
Context matters: Buffett’s brand is long-term thinking, patience, and incentives. This quote applies that same logic to character. Markets aren’t the only things that compound; habits do, too. He frames self-improvement as choosing a room where the default behavior is already higher than your current baseline, then letting time do the heavy lifting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Afternoon Session) (Warren Buffett, 2004)
Evidence: It's better to hang out with people better than you. I found that very easy to do over the years. (Laughs) But if you're picking associates, pick out those whose behavior is somewhat better than yours, and you'll drift in that direction. (Segment 30 (Advice to young people: avoid credit card debt and hang out with people better than you)). This is a primary-source transcript synced to video from Berkshire Hathaway’s 2004 Annual Meeting (dated May 1, 2004) hosted on the CNBC Buffett Archive. The wording commonly shared online matches this transcript closely, though many versions omit Buffett’s parenthetical aside (“I found that very easy to do…”). A contemporaneous secondary publication that repeats the quote (not the primary source) is CNN Money’s May 3, 2004 piece “Lessons from Warren Buffett,” which quotes the same lines from the meeting. Other candidates (1) Buffett's Tips (John M. Longo, Tyler J. Longo, 2025) compilation97.8% ... It's better to hang out with people better than you . Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours , a... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Buffett, Warren. (2026, February 11). It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/its-better-to-hang-out-with-people-better-than-16648/
Chicago Style
Buffett, Warren. "It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction." FixQuotes. February 11, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/its-better-to-hang-out-with-people-better-than-16648/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction." FixQuotes, 11 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/its-better-to-hang-out-with-people-better-than-16648/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2026.
