I was watching a fascinating piece on Warren Buffett and wanted to share some interesting facts about his life and his practices. I know I used Warren Buffett in another column, but thought it was time to return to this once in a lifetime legend.
One thing that I didn’t know was that that Warren and Bill Gates are extremely close (by sheer happenstance) and when both were asked by a family friend to write down the one word that you would use to describe yourself and why you are a success, both Gates and Buffett (on their own) quietly wrote down the word FOCUS.
More on that later.
The recent piece on Warren really provided an insight and intimate look at this individual who we now identify as the godfather of the stock market and the model of good old fashioned entrepreneurial capitalism. The most important fact is that Warren Buffet has contributed over $56.7 billion to charity and holds the distinction of giving more to charity than any other person on earth. How does one reach such rarified and universal recognition? Let’s find out.
Interestingly, Warren is very much a loner, but he puts himself out here as a social player and while he plays by his own simple home spun rules, despite his earth-shattering success and wealth, he is still that down to earth kid from Omaha, Nebraska.
You can see Warren now at the stockholder meetings in a huge arena mixing it up with the 40,000 shareholders (started out with 30 in a cafeteria). He presents partly as P.T. Barnum and partly as a financial savant, but he really is a common man and a person who shows none of his massive fortune. Warren is a man of great disciplines and admits to his strengths and his obvious weaknesses. Warren once said that making money was easy and understanding human nature is the most difficult thing to master.
Some of us can appreciate and empathize with Warren’s struggle to understand human relations and he seems far more comfortable reviewing stacks of annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q than engaging and understanding the human dynamic of friends and family.
I learned a number of things about this individual. The obvious, he is just sheer brilliance. There are also a few themes that he lives by—
- A) Treat everyone the same.
- B) Regarding love, the more you give, the more you get back.
- C) The key to making money is time.
- D) Focus is the key to success.
- E) Watch small expenses and avoid debt (most importantly credit cards).
His life must be documented and, in the years to come a full anthology of his life must be made and everyone should see it.
Because many reading this column suffer from attention deficit disorder, I reduce some of the many facts and tidbits of this larger-than-life profile to the following one liners:
- Warren spends up to 80% of his day reading.
- He was rejected from Harvard Business school.
- He drinks 5 to 6 Coca-Cola’s a day.
- He eats at McDonalds every morning–bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit if the market is up or two sausage patties if the market is down.
- He has lived in the same house since 1958.
- He had a flip phone until converting to an iPhone in 2020.
- He is donating over 85% of his Berkshire stock to charity.
- He has played the ukulele since he was a teenager when he tried to impress a girl at school.
- He has sent one email in his life (to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft) and that one email ended up in a federal lawsuit.
10) President Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Honor
11) His favorite television show is Breaking Bad.
12) His three children, Susan, Howard, and Peter, are his greatest joys and Warren funded all three with their charitable foundations.
13) 99% of his generated wealth was earned after he turned 50 years old.
14) He is worth over 137.8 billion dollars.
15) He is an excellent bridge player.
16) His favorite read is the New Yorker Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World and Wall Street.
17) During a scandal, Warren reluctantly took over the Wall Street firm, Saloman, and took full responsibility for improper trading that he had nothing do with.
18) Warren has the same 25 staffers within his central nerve office, and all are virtually without titles.
19) He bought stock in Berkshire to fire the CFO who had misrepresented some fact.
20) Charles Munger was his lifelong and dearest friend and was the more acerbic and blunt of the two.
21) Warren admits his most difficult challenge was to understand human nature.
22) The death of his beloved wife, Susan, left him nearly broken and he went dark and bunkered down.
23) Warren remarried long-time family friend, Astrid Menks.
24) Warren’s Five Rules are – investing long term, staying informed, maintaining a competitive advantage, focusing on quality, and managing risk.
25) Warren sleeps 8 hours per day and makes roughly 60 million dollars per day.
The point of this column was to highlight that FOCUS needs to be an ever constant and evolving skill set that keeps us in line with our carefully laid out plans. We are all running around and have a hard time staying focused on the end game. Perhaps we can all borrow the word FOCUS from Warren’s playbook and make sure it is front and center of all that we prioritize in our lives. The other point is maybe, just maybe, as we work hard to acquire generational wealth, that we can focus just as hard on planning to provide significant dollars to the charities in need.
There is much more I can write about this individual, but I think we have covered enough ground for a day.