He was the single most successful investor of the 20th century.
Time Magazine named him one of the most influential people in the world.
He's worth over 70 billion dollars.
He's Warren Buffett, and here are his top 10 rules for success.
How can other people... tap dance to work, what's the secret of that?
You find your passion, you find your passion.
I was very, very lucky to find ....
you know what? I was ...
Seven or eight years old and, you know
and fortunately my children have found their passion.
My, you know, one son loves farming like nothing else.
One son loves music like everything else.
And all three of them love philanthropy and what they get to do.
You're lucky in life when you find it, and uh–
you can't guarantee you're gonna find it in your first job
but I always tell the college students to come out
I say, "Take the job that you would take if you would take if
you were independently wealthy."
You know, that's, you're going to do well at it.
If you think you're going to be a lot happier if you've got 2x instead of x, you're probably making a mistake.
I mean ... You oughta find something you like that's– that works with that
I am pagle abbas is good and also hassan is good and iam pagle
Because then you will do things like borrow money when you shouldn't
... or maybe cut corners on things that your employer wants you to cut corners on.
It just doesn't make any sense.
You won't like it when you look back on it...
The three things in hiring to people you look for are integrity, intelligence and energy
and he said, "If the person didn't have the first two, that the latter two would kill him"
because if they don't have integrity, you want 'em dumb and lazy. You don't want 'em smart and energetic.
It never bothered me, if people...
disagreed with what I thought,
as long as I felt I knew the facts.
I mean there's a whole bunch of things that I don't know a thing about.
I just stay away from those.
So, I stay within what I call my circle of competence.
Tom Watson said it best.
He said, "I'm no genius but I'm smart in spots and I stay around those spots."
Well, I try and stay around those spots ...
and I just don't have a problem if
somebody says you know you are wrong on something.
I just go back and look at the facts...
and I think that really is much more important, frankly,
than– than having a few more points of IQ or...
or having an extra course or two in school or anything of the sort.
You need emotional stability.
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 newspaper. I read a fair number of magazines.
I read 10-Ks, I read annual reports and I read a lot of other things too.
So I've always enjoyed reading, I love reading biographies.
Famous lesson about a margin of safety ...
you don't drive a truck
that weighs 99-hundred pounds across a bridge
that says limit 10-thousand pounds
because you can't be that sure about it
If you see something like that, go a down
further down the road and go by one that says,
"limit 20,000 pounds" .. and that's the one you drive across
The nature of capitalism is that people want to come and take your castle.
Perfectly understandable.
I mean, if I'm selling television sets or something
there's going to be ten other people trying to sell a better television set.
If I have a restaurant here in Omaha,
people are gonna try and copy my menu
and give more parking and take my chef, and so on ...
So, capitalism's all about
somebody coming and trying to take the castle.
Now, what you need
is you need a castle that has some durable ...
competitive advantage ...
Some castle that has a moat around it.
And that moat, that's one of the best moats, in many respects
is to be a low-cost producer.
But sometimes the moat is just having more talent.
I mean, if you're the heavyweight champion of the world
and you keep knocking out people, you've got
a competitive advantage as long as you can keep doing it.
And it's very profitable
if you're the one that happens to be able to do it.
If you can turn out great motion pictures ...
Steven Spielberg ...
I mean, he's a fellow to bet on
and it has enormous economic value.
You'd be surprised
at– at my days
I mean, they are very
unstructured
Uh ... no meetings
uh ... none
I mean ... we don't ... I don't like meetings
and, uh ...
I read a lot
I wish I were a faster reader.
I'd get more done. But I do read a lot.
And I– I, uh... I'm on the phone
a moderate amount.
Uh...
Our businesses run themselves, basically, out there.
My job is allocating capital
and that's what I'm thinking about.
But I don't like to have
things all packed hour to hour to hour
and Bill and I are both
extraordinarily lucky ... I mean, we really get to do
what we like to do the way we wanna do it
with the people that we choose to be around that are terrific.
I mean, we've really got everything
our way
and we're very fortunate.
And ... in his world, he has some...
he has a different kind of pace than I have
but we both love it the way we do it
and
my guess is that we're each
the most productive
in that particular mode, too
because it ...
it fits our personalities and aptitudes.
What kills great businesses
If you look at... I do believe in looking at history
and I–
I try to
I like to study failure, actually ... my partner says
all I wanna know is where I'll die
so I'll never go there.
And we want to see what has caused
businesses to go bad
and the biggest thing that kills 'em is complacency.
You want a restlessness
a feeling that
you know, that
somebody's always after you
but you're gonna stay ahead of them
you always want to be on the move.
And, uh...
when you've got a great business
you know, like Coca Cola, which is ...
there aren't any like Coca Cola.
But you really...
the danger would always be
that you rest on your morals
but I see none of that in Coca Cola
that is the key:
to compete the same way when you've got
1.8 billion servings being sold daily
as when you were selling
ten a day
that restlessness, that belief
that tomorrow's more exciting
than today.
You know, you just have to have it permeate the organizations.
Who was Ben Graham ...?
He was your primary mentor, model ...
He was a wonderful man
and he was my professor at Columbia
I read his book when I was 19
at the University of Nebraska.
And I'd started investing when I was eleven
and I started reading about him when I was like seven.
So, I had gone through all ...
I'd read every book in the Omaha Public Library that there was on...,
by the time I was twelve, on investing and stock market.
And I had a lot of fun,
but I never really found out...
I never got grounded in anything
and it was entertaining
but it wasn't gonna be profitable.
And then I read Graham's book
The Intelligent Investor
when I was at University of Nebraska
and that just opened the whole thing up to me.
And I named my oldest son