The fascinating life of Warren Buffett

Mr. Warren Buffett, known as “The Oracle of Omaha”, a brilliant business man and perhaps the most famous investor of all time. He held the position of world’s wealthiest man for many years, and his name pervades the news and is mentioned in virtually every book you can find that talks about the stock market. A man with an aura of humbleness and simplicity albeit being also known for his aggressiveness in negotiations and what some may identify as an obsession with money.

I’ve always been fascinated with business, and consider myself an apprentice stock market investor; needless to say, Mr. Buffett’s life has always been a source of admiration and curiosity for me. That curiosity led me to purchase Snowball, a biographic book written by Alice Schroeder.

Yet the book sat unread in my office for many months, I purchased it back in March 2018. Call me superstitious, but I think, sometimes, books find you when the right time has arrived, and elude you when you are not ready, and my encounter with Snowball, although delayed by years, finally came.

The ovarian lottery

How does your family and birthplace define you? Would you be the same person and have the same achievements had you been born in a poorer part of the world? Had your parents neglected you or perhaps loved you a little more? Nobody chose where to be born, and Buffett uses a term to describe this seemingly random occurrence: the ovarian lottery.

I laughed when I first read the words, yet, I can see the concept reflected in me: I can see how my life, from its very beginning, has been framed, driven and at the same time constrained by a set of characteristics that surround me and have, to a (large) degree, defined who and where I am today.

Buffett’s ovarian number was lucky enough, he was born in a time and place that enabled him to show and augment his natural tendencies and abilities from a very young age, and having lived with a combination of family support and family hardship, he was encouraged and influenced towards his one ambition, numbers.

A people collector

His obsession with numbers is evident across most aspects of his life, a desire to count and accumulate - whether it be stamps, golf balls or companies - a word describes Mr. Buffett perhaps better than any other: collector. His interest in collecting gets mentioned repeatedly in the book.

Personally, I think this drive to collect is likely the core motivator to most of his behavior.

… three roles invariably interested him. The first was the relentless collector, expanding his empire of money, people and influence. The second was the preacher, sprinkling idealism from the lectern. The third was the cop, foiling the bad guys.

There are two collections that, from my interpretation, are hist most crucial ones: money which should come to no surprise to anyone, yet unbeknownst to me, his other collection is people.

Money is undoubtedly the most visible, but people perhaps the most relevant, for his people collection is what helps him towards two imperative objectives: on the one hand his need for love and admiration, and on the other, to make money.

If you ask me, his people collection has been perhaps the most critical factor in his success.

Of course I’m not questioning his uncanny ability in finding investment bargains, but those bargains many a times came with considerable problems, and it was his network of close confidants -people as faithful to him as he was loyal to them- that sprung to the rescue, replacing dysfunctional management and making tough yet strategic business decisions, which in turn made his investments successful.

Just as human as you and me

I think Alice Schroeder does a fantastic job in portraying Mr. Buffett’s life, full of strengths, weaknesses and beliefs.

You see his life unfold, evolve and mature over time, his mistakes as well as his successes.

The fact he’s just as much of a human being as you and me is evident and reassuring. It doesn’t take an “oracle” to succeed in something the way Mr. Buffett has succeeded in business - it takes one key component:

Then at dinner, Bill Gates Sr. posed the question to the whole: What factor did people feel was the most important in getting to where they’d gotten in life? And I said ‘focus’. And Bill said the same thing.

A relentless focus and drive towards one ambition, that, to a degree, shadows other aspects of his life and leaves them underdeveloped or completely outside of his field of vision, which speaks to his own limitations as a human: our capacity is unlimited, but time and bandwidth are not. Balance is a tricky thing to achieve when one’s looking for extraordinary results in one area.

Paradoxical views

A laser will burn through steel, yet leave everything around it in utter darkness. Perhaps it’s the masterful focus Mr. Buffett applies to his one ambition the source of the conflict between the ideas he preaches, and his own choices in life.

I struggled with this contradiction - how could the advice he provides to others sometimes seem so contrarian to the way he handles his relationship with his family as well as some of his own personal lifestyle choices?

A resistance to waste, yet completely disregarding nature or travel, that to me represent wasting one of the most enriching and sublime experiences of our life on this planet.

A focus on maintaining his own as well as his family’s weight under control, to the point of incorporating weight in his arrangements for money with his children, while his own diet is full of sugary drinks and greasy hamburgers.

But as I read on, his evolution and growth were evident, and then I remembered that he is indeed just as human as I am, and he also struggles with the same issues we all do, keeping balance, managing time.

I have not been spared from those difficult choices, and I have to admit, there’s a little bit of worry inside me - is it possible to live an extraordinary life, to be the best at something, without having to surrender a subset of life’s experiences?

I remain hopeful in that extraordinary achievements can be made without sacrificing some of life’s unique value, including family - there is no question as to what my choice would be between my professional life and being absolutely present in my children’s life.

The problem with time

So how do you balance multiple objectives, how do you become extraordinary at something within the constraints of our limited existence?

Compounding, the effect of time on good investments, is what has driven Mr. Buffett’s success - but there is a caveat to time, for time is immune to the benefit of compounding onto itself.

Time leaves you behind if you don’t act when you should have, opportunities that present themselves once may never come back, age is the quintessential proof of that, ignore your health in your youth, and your life will be a lot harder in old age.

This characteristic of time is the source of most of Mr. Buffett’s regrets - the errors that follow him are not sourced in actions he took, rather in all those that he did not take in due time.

Miraculous acts followed by blind faith

At points as I read the early stages of Mr. Buffett’s rise to fame, managing money for his close friends and family, biblical stories kept coming to mind:

An exceptional person, followed by a loyal group of faithful, who did not need any true understanding of the way he performed his miraculous feats, simply because of their awe in witnessing the magnitude of the experienced outcome.

And Buffett as the teacher, speaking in metaphors looking to indirectly lead his faithful following to greener pastures, with the promise of a compounding life where one dollar would become a thousand just like the miracle of the multiplication of bread, while he lives a humble life casted away from the sinful land of Wall Street.

A scale of business beyond imagination

Probably one of the most eye-opening discoveries to me from reading Mr. Buffett’s fascinating life, particularly as his fame and wealth progressed, is the dimension at which global business operates.

I’ve been an entrepreneur, have worked with Fortune 500s and have spent time with CEOs and CTOs, but it’s evident to me I haven’t yet even scratched the surface of the topmost circles of power and influence.

Spheres exist of extreme wealth, there is a scale of business and lifestyle beyond what most of us have the ability to explore or even imagine.

The key here is that it is possible to work towards reaching that summit, and it takes a bit of ovarian lottery luck, but also a lot of hard work and focus, relentless, infinite focus towards an ambitious goal.

Most of them were prominent businessmen accustomed to stress and pressure, from a generation of men that considered poise and equanimity in the face of disaster as essential as the suits and ties they wore every day to work.

The internal scorecard

It was very inspirational to read Snowball - focus being one of those key inspirations that have been further cemented in my mind as critical to success - but a close second is the ability to remain true to yourself.

Buffett calls that ability his internal scorecard, and it’s something he learned from his father, and a characteristic that is enormously representative of the way he runs his life.

And the truth you are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you. You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right. In the end, that’s what counts.

This self-determination and internal guiding principle sets one apart, and allows to truly materialize one’s own potential.

Too many tokens of wisdom

In the end, I’m very grateful for Snowball to have finally found me, and it did indeed teach me a lot from an extraordinary man sharing extraordinary advice through the course of a fascinating life.

It is hard to put in a single article the myriad of quotes and insights I noted down as I read the book, and I encourage you to go ahead and read it as well, but to close up, let me share with you a few quotes that particularly resonated with me, and I think will likely be very valuable to you as well.

On patience:

He helped her understand that it was always a mistake to pay too much for something you wanted. Impatience is the enemy.

On money:

Rule number one, don’t lose money. Rule number two, don’t forget rule number one. Rule number three, don’t go in debt.

On opportunity:

Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless

And the most important one - a piece of knowledge that it took him a lifetime to acquire:

The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you.

Stay up to date with new content, join my mailing list!.