The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [180]
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.9
He spoke of the meaning of suffering. Inspired to nonviolent resistance by Gandhi, King invoked the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the persecuted, it said, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
As touched as she was by Dr. King’s powerful words, Susie must also have been deeply moved by the way he transfixed her husband.10 Buffett had always responded to powerful, charismatic orators. Now he saw King standing before him: moral courage in the flesh, a man who had been beaten and imprisoned, put in shackles and sentenced to hard labor, stabbed and clubbed for his beliefs, a man who had carried a movement on the strength of his ideas for nearly a decade despite enraged opposition, violence, and limited success. King had once described the power of nonviolence, which “has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience…. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that some things are so precious, that there are some things so dear, some things so eternally worthful, that they are worth dying for. If an individual has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. When one discovers this, there is power in this method.”11
King was a prophet, a man who saw a vision of glory, of evil exposed through visible suffering, of people roused from sleep by the sight of horrors. He called his followers to nail themselves to his vision, to lift it up behind them and drag it through the streets. Christianity, he said, has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. One of his lines, which he repeated in many of his speeches, struck Buffett’s heart and pierced his reason.12
“The laws are not to change the heart,” he said, “but to restrain the heartless.”
“With that great voice of his, he just rumbled that out, and then went on and used that as a theme.”
Susie had often told her husband that there was more to life than sitting in a room making money. That October 1967, in the throes of the civil-rights struggle, he had written a special letter to the partners, which showed that something in his thoughts had changed. This letter went out a little earlier than the annual report he wrote to the partners each year, and it laid out his strategy without revealing the year’s pending results. After describing the “hyper-reactive pattern of market behavior against which my analytical techniques have limited value,” he went on to say: “My own personal interests dictate a less compulsive approach to superior investment results than when I was younger and leaner…. I am out of step with present conditions. On one point, however, I am clear. I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand (although I find it difficult to apply) even though it may mean forgoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don’t fully understand, have not practiced successfully, and which, possibly, could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital.”
He also brought up another reason for this “less compulsive approach”: Personal goals, he said, had begun to intrude: “I would like to have an economic goal which allows for considerable noneconomic activity…. I am likely to limit myself to things which are reasonably easy, safe, profitable, and pleasant.”
Buffett then stunned his partners by dropping his stated goal of beating the market by ten points a year to beating it by just five points a year—or to earning nine percent, whichever was less. If they could