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“The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.

“Here’s another one. If the world couldn’t see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world’s greatest investor but in reality have the world’s worst record? Or be thought of as the world’s worst investor when you were actually the best?

“In teaching your kids, I think the lesson they’re learning at a very, very early age is what their parents put the emphasis on. If all the emphasis is on what the world’s going to think about you, forgetting about how you really behave, you’ll wind up with an Outer Scorecard. Now my dad: He was a hundred percent Inner Scorecard guy.

“He was really a maverick. But he wasn’t a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. He just didn’t care what other people thought. My dad taught me how life should be lived. I’ve never seen anybody quite like him.”

PART TWO

The Inner Scorecard

5

The Urge to Preach

Nebraska • 1869–1928

John Buffett, the first known Buffett in the New World, was a serge weaver believed to be of French Huguenot descent. He fled to America in the seventeenth century to escape religious persecution and settled in Huntington, Long Island as a farmer.

Little else is known of the earliest Buffetts in the United States, except that they were farmers.1 It is clear, however, that Warren Buffett’s urge to preach is part of a family legacy. An early example was one of John Buffett’s sons,2 remembered for sailing north across the Long Island Sound to a coastal settlement in Connecticut, where he climbed a hill and commenced to preach religion to the heathens. But it is doubtful that the outcasts, scofflaws, and unbelievers of Greenwich repented on hearing his words, since history records that lightning promptly struck him down.

Several generations later, Zebulon Buffett, a farmer in Dix Hills, Long Island, left his trace on the family tree as the first recorded exemplar of another Buffett trait—treating one’s own relatives with extreme tightfistedness—when his grandson, Sidney Homan Buffett, quit his job working on Zebulon’s farm in disgust over the insultingly low pay.

A gangly teenager, Sidney went west to Omaha, Nebraska, to join his maternal grandfather George Homan in his livery-stable business.3 The year was 1867; Omaha a settlement consisting mainly of a collection of wooden shacks. Since its days as a trail-outfitting center for westbound prospectors during the Gold Rush, Omaha supplied the staples to pioneers—gambling, women, and booze.4 But with the end of the Civil War, it was about to be transformed. A grand transcontinental railroad would link the coasts of the newly reunited states for the first time, and Abraham Lincoln himself decreed that Omaha would be the railroad’s headquarters. The coming of the Union Pacific filled the town with a bustling commercial spirit, as well as a sense of destiny. Nonetheless, the place retained its reputation as the Sodom of a pious state,5 and a well-known “rogue’s rookery.”

After working at the livery stable, Sidney left to open the first grocery store in a town with no paved streets. In this respectable but modest business, he sold fruit, vegetables, and game until eleven every night: prairie chickens for a quarter, jackrabbits for a dime.6 His grandfather Zebulon feared for Sidney’s prospects and pelted him with letters containing advice, all rules that—with one significant exception—his descendents still heed.

“Try to be punctual in all your dealings. You will find it difficult to get along with some men, deal as little as possible with such…. Save your credit, for that is