The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [13]
Yet the two, in many people’s minds, were almost interchangeable. Buffett himself referred to them as “Siamese twins, practically.” They walked with the same lurching, awkward gait. They wore the same sort of gray suits draped stiffly over their frames, the inflexible bodies of men who have spent decades reading books and newspapers rather than playing sports or working outdoors. They arranged their graying hair in the same comb-over, they wore similar Clark Kentish glasses, and the same intensity flickered through their eyes.
They thought alike and had the same fascination with business as a puzzle worth spending a lifetime to solve. Both regarded rationality and honesty as the highest virtues. Quickened pulses and self-delusion, in their view, were the major causes of mistakes. They liked to ponder the reasons for failure as a way of deducing the rules of success. “I had long looked for insight by inversion, in the intense manner counseled by the great algebraist Carl Jacobi,” Munger said. “‘Invert, always invert.’” He illustrated this with the story of a wise peasant who said, “Tell me where I’m going to die so I won’t go there.”2 But while Munger meant this figuratively, Buffett took it more literally. He lacked Munger’s subtle sense of fatalism, particularly when it came to the subject of his own mortality.
Both men, however, were infected by the urge to preach. Munger described himself as “didactic.” He labored over occasional speeches on the art of successful living, which struck people as so insightful that they were hoarded and passed from hand to hand until, finally, the Internet made them accessible to all. He grew so enthused delivering these speeches that, on a few occasions, he became “self-intoxicated,” as Buffett put it, and had to be dragged from the stage. In private, Munger tended to lecture either himself or his audience, making conversations with him like sitting in the back of a runaway stagecoach.
But while he considered himself an amateur scientist and architect and did not hesitate to expound on Einstein, Darwin, rational habits of thinking, and the ideal distance between houses in a Santa Barbara subdivision, Munger was nonetheless wary of venturing very far from what he had spent some time to learn. He dreaded falling prey to what a Harvard Law School classmate of his had called “the Shoe Button Complex.”
“His father commuted daily with the same group of men,” Munger said. “One of them had managed to corner the market in shoe buttons—a really small market, but he had it all. He pontificated on every subject, all subjects imaginable. Cornering the market on shoe buttons made him an expert on everything. Warren and I have always sensed it would be a big mistake to behave that way.”3
Buffett was in no danger of suffering from the Shoe Button Complex. He feared appearing obnoxious or, worse, sanctimonious. He believed in what he called the Circle of Competence, drew a line around himself, and stayed within the three subjects on which he would be recognized as absolutely expert: money, business, and his own life.
Yet, like Munger, he had his own form of self-intoxication. While Munger chose his speeches selectively but had trouble winding them up, Buffett could usually conclude a lecture, but found it hard not to start one.
He gave speeches; he wrote articles; he wrote editorials; he gathered people at parties and gave little lessons; he testified in lawsuits; he appeared in television documentaries and did television interviews and took journalists along with him on trips; he went around to colleges and taught classes; he got college students to come and visit him; he gave lessons at the openings of furniture stores, the inauguration of insurance telemarketing centers, and dinners for would-be customers