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
