Warren Buffett: Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything
that improves your own talents. Nobody can take that away from me. They can run
up huge deficits and the dollar can become worth far less, you can have all kinds of things happen,
but if you've got talents yourself and you've maximized your talent,
you've got a terrific asset. And that doesn’t mean everybody should go to college but it does mean
that any way you find to improve communication skills are enormously important. I mean I took a
Dale Carnegie course that I paid $100 for and it was worth a college degree.
Warren Buffett: If you're looking at your life at a young age like you are,
and you can choose what kind of a person you can be why not be the person you admire rather than
the person you can't stand? So simple. So just write down the qualities you like. Take your five
best friends. Why do you like them? And just write down those qualities
and you will find there's no quality there that you can't have yourself. And similarly,
with the five people you can't stand to be around, put those things down to turn you off about those
people. And if they turn you off about them, why should you possess them? It's so simple.
Warren Buffett: It’s enormously important to have people work with you in life. They're
going to work with you in life if they like you. And they may occasionally, I mean, if
you're in the Army or something you may work for somebody that you don't like. But by and large,
you're going to get the best out of people if they feel good about you. And it's just so easy,
but you've got to develop the habits early because you can't say I'm going to suddenly
become a terribly attractive person when I'm 60. It just doesn't work that way. So pick up
the right habits now and I will guarantee you if you actually just write down those
qualities and think about it, you will find you can have every one of the attractive qualities,
get rid of the ones that are negative and your life will be different.
Warren Buffett: I made a lot of mistakes. Biggest mistake, well, not necessarily
the biggest but buying Berkshire Hathaway itself was a mistake. Because virtually, it was a lousy
textile business. And I bought it very cheap. I've been taught by Ben Graham to buy things on
a quantitative basis. Look around for things that are cheap. And that, I was taught, that
same 1949-50 made a big impression on me. So I went around looking for what I call used cigar
butts of stocks. And the cigar butt approach to buying stocks is that you walk down the street
and you're looking around for cigar butts and you find this, honestly, this terrible-looking soggy
ugly-looking cigar, one puff left in it. But you pick it up and you get your one puff. Disgusting,
but it's free. I mean it's cheap. And then you look around for another soggy
you know one puff cigar. Well, that's what I did for years. It's a mistake. Although,
you make money doing it but you can't make it with big money. It is so much easier just
to buy wonderful businesses. So now I would rather buy a wonderful business at a fair price
than a fair business with a wonderful price. But in those days I was buying cheap stocks and
Berkshire was selling below its working capital per share. You have plans for nothing, you had
the machinery for nothing, you get the inventory, and receivables of the discount. It was cheap.
So I bought it. And twenty years later I was still running a lousy business and that
money did not compound. You rea lly want to build a wonderful business, because the time
is the friend of the wonderful business. You keep compounding, it keeps doing more
business and you keep making more money. Time is the enemy of the lousy business. I could
have sold Berkshire, perhaps liquidated it and made a quick little profit, you know, one puff.
But staying with those kinds of businesses is a big mistake. So you might say I learned
something out of that mistake and I would have been way better off taking,
what I did with Berkshire was I kept buying but better businesses. I started insurance
business, seeds, candy, the Buffalo and all kinds of things. I would have been way better doing that
with a brand-new little entity that I'd set up rather than using Berkshire as the
platform. Now I've had a lot of fun out of it. I mean everything in life seems to turn out for
the better. So I don't have any complaints about that but it was a dumb thing to do.
Voice over: You will make mistakes.
But as long as you are willing to learn from them, you shouldn’t worry.
If you chose to see mistakes as an opportunity to learn,
rather than a failure, you can get so much out of them.
But the best thing is that many people have already done what you want to do.
Many people have trod the arduous and lonely road to success and you can learn from their mistakes.
You have the information at your disposal, to become the best at what you do.
Invest in yourself.
Find out what your strengths are and use them to your advantage.
Work on your weaknesses to minimize them.
And have the right people around you to help you on your journey.
Choose your heroes, choose your mentors and learn from them.
Build a sharp mind.
Drink from the fountain of knowledge.
Every information you absorb can be essential to your success.
It can be the filter to point what stocks are worth buying,
what businesses are worth creating, what opportunities shouldn’t be wasted.
Your success depends upon your ability to read any situation.
And the more you know, the more accurate you will be.
Warren Buffett: I just read and read and read. I probably read five to six hours a day. I don't
read as fast now as when I was younger but I read five daily newspapers, I read a fair number
of magazines. I read 10ks, I read annual reports and I read a lot of other things too. So I’ve
always enjoyed reading. I love reading biographies for example.
Warren Buffett: I look to the business to determine whether I made a good investment and I'm
concerned about, you know, whether we have new competition, how we do over the year.
But it's the business I look at. When you're just looking at the price of something you're
not investing. I mean, if you buy something, Bitcoin for example, or some cryptocurrency,
you're not looking to the asset itself to produce anything. If you buy an apartment
house you're looking at all the apartment houses. You buy a farm, you look at the farm. If you buy a
whole business you're looking how the business does. If you buy a part of a business why
shouldn't you look at how the business is going to do? People get charmed by lots of action and
the fact that things are liquid and all of that. And it does have repercussions back
into the market. When you get something like you know AETN arrangement on the, you know
supercharged on the VIX, I mean, where you can lose 90 percent of your money in one day. I mean
that really doesn't belong with the word investment. I mean it's just it's gambling.
Voice over: Do you know why so many people who invest lose everything?
It’s because they are not really investing.
They are gambling.
They buy something because it is cheap,
or because a friend told them they made a lot of money from it.
That is a sure way to fail.
To invest is to believe.
When you buy a stock, you have to buy it because you believe in that business.
Because you believe it will grow and change the world.
That’s how you get rich.
By seizing the opportunities do be a part of the endeavors that will change the world.
That should be your vision.
You should be passionate about your investments and not just a detached consumer.
Everything you do, everything you create,
everything you buy, must be in alignment with what you love.
It must help you get closer and closer to your dreams.
The journey can be hard, but it doesn’t mean you are not allowed to do what you love.
Because loving what you do is what separates the great from the mediocre people.
It is what defines the people who leave their mark on the world.
Warren Buffett: I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.
I get to do it with people I like. I get to...
I don't have to associate with anybody that causes my stomach to churn.
And the only thing in my job I don't like. and it only happens about every three or four years,
occasionally I have to fire somebody and I don't like it. That's the only thing. Other
than I tap dance to work and I get down there and I think I'm supposed to lie on my back and
paint the ceiling, you know, or something I mean that's what I feel. And it doesn't diminish, it's
tremendous fun. So, you know, if they say that success is getting what you want and happiness is
wanting what you get, well, I don't know which one applies in this case but I do know that I wouldn't
be doing anything else. I do advise you, you know, go to work for an organization that you admire,
people you admire because it'll turn you on and you ought to be happy where you are working.