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Warren buffett success story summary6/21/2023 ![]() Warren diets by numbers – how else? He would sometimes limit himself to as little as 1,000 calories a day, but he's managed the budget however he liked. There are lessons to be learnt about, say, dieting. After all, this Master of the Universe has a philosophy for every part of life, not just arbitrage. ![]() So, what can we learn from the Sage of Omaha? Should we all be reprogramming our minds to work the Warren way? Well, we can try. He felt that the amount – $180,000 – would be pretty easy for him to earn himself. Interestingly, when his own father was dying in 1964, he had himself removed from the will to increase the share left to his two sisters. He was never going to bequeath it to his children (he has three) as he doesn't believe that to be a morally sound act, but he has been increasingly generous to them in recent years, when he appears to have mellowed on the subject. After much consideration, he concluded that they were the only people who knew how to deal with such a fantastic amount of money – about $60bn. It was love at first sight when Warren met Bill in 1991, and it wasn't a huge surprise when, in 2006, he announced that he would give most of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He then spends his day trading and reading every single scrap of financial information he can acquire, including daily reports on the performance of each of the thousands of companies he owns reports detailing everything down to how many pounds of Peanut Butter Hearts were sold by See's Candies the day before. Unless travelling to board meetings on his private jet (the famously named Indefensible), his days always follow the same pattern: he drives one and a half miles from the house he bought in 1958 to the modest office he's always occupied in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, in the Midwest, and sits down at the desk that had belonged to his father Howard, at exactly 8.30am. The funny thing is that what he wanted to do every day was always exactly the same. The idea of doing what I wanted to do every day was important to me." And the biggest thing I wanted was to work for myself. Then I could do what I wanted with my life. This would become the template of how he would always do business, and the foundation of the investment partnership that eventually become Berkshire Hathaway.īy the time he was 10, Warren had pretty much figured out what he was going to do with his life. He often used to involve friends in these small enterprises, realising that because he was somewhat socially awkward and emotionally withdrawn himself, it was essential to network within a group of trusted peers. It wasn't long before he had diversified into Coca-Cola (a brand he would, many years later, own a large chunk of) and used golf balls, which he spent hours collecting. He could memorise whole books of numbers, and when he was six he ran his own business selling chewing gum door to door. His interests quickly spread to collecting – stamps, coins, bottle tops, licence-plate numbers – and, of course, reading. Warren's infatuation with numbers began very early in life, when he started to calculate the odds on which of his marbles would go down the plughole first, in a game of his own devising. Nonetheless, it took someone special to make it all sound so simple in the first place. You just want to pick him up and take him home. He looks like George Burns, and he plays the ukulele plus, he is not a crook. To know Warren – and I think of him as Warren now – is to love him. It is surely the book of the moment, because a history of Warren Buffett is a history of high finance from the 1930s to the present day. ![]() ![]() The publication of the thousand-page official biography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball by Alice Schroeder, couldn't have come at a better time. A Master of the Universe who does not live in a lateral duplex penthouse shrine to his own fabulous ego? What the hell was going on here? It said that in spite of being richer than God, Buffett has always lived in the house that he bought for $31,500 in 1958. (Or both, as it turns out.) Anyway, there was an intriguing nugget in this article. Bankers and investors were people you gave a wide berth to at parties, on the grounds that they were certainly immoral and probably criminal. At the time, I did know the difference between a repayment mortgage and an interest-only mortgage, but that was about the extent of my interest in financial affairs. I first heard of Warren Buffett 10 years ago, in an article written by Dominic Lawson. ![]()
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