The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [430]
Buffett had talked many times before about mistakes. But when he spoke, as he often did, of his mistakes of omission, he never ventured beyond business mistakes. The errors of omission in his personal life—inattention, neglect, missed chances—were always there, the side effects of intensity; but they were shadow presences visible only to those who knew him well. He spoke of them only in private, if at all.
To the students, he explained his “Twenty Punches” approach to investing. “You’d get very rich,” he said, “if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.”
He ran his life on Twenty Punches, too, with as little flitting as he could arrange. Same house, same wife for fifty years, same Astrid on Farnam Street; no desire to buy and sell real estate, art, cars, tokens of wealth; no jumping from city to city or career to career. Some of that was easy for a man so certain of himself; some of it came with being a creature of habit; some of it was a natural tendency to let things compound; and some of it was the wisdom of inertia. When he gave somebody a punch on his card, they became a part of him and that decision was permanent. Any crack in the facade of permanence was extraordinarily difficult for him to face.
A few days later, police arrived early in the morning to close nearby streets for the crowd they expected at the Washington National Cathedral, its gargoyle-bedecked flying buttresses silhouetted against a bright blue sky.28 Television crews began to set up for an elaborately orchestrated event that had all the trappings of a funeral for a head of state. By late morning, buses bearing Washington Post employees pulled up one by one. A blue-and-white-striped bus carrying members of the Senate arrived, and people began streaming in from cars and limousines. Gradually the front pews filled with dignitaries like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Lynne and Dick Cheney. Around the Cathedral famous faces were everywhere: Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer; celebrity journalists Charlie Rose, Tom Brokaw, Mike Wallace, and Ted Koppel; USA Today publisher Al Neuharth; Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his wife, journalist Andrea Mitchell; editor Tina Brown; Senator Ted Kennedy; Congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.29 Hundreds, then thousands, of people filed in through the enormous bronze doors to the sound of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra Brass Ensemble, gradually assembling into what looked like the largest crowd the cathedral had ever held.30
From the nave, thousands of men in dark suits and white shirts formed a Mondrian backdrop for the women, a pointillist grid of black and white. The women wore houndstooth check and crisp seersucker; black suits with dainty white cotton blouses; sleeveless black sheaths with jackets and sleeveless black sheaths with bare arms; white skirts with black sweaters; and black jackets over dotted Swiss and black-and-white polka-dotted dresses. Their heads were topped with small black hats with discreet netting, black-and-white picture hats fit for Ladies’ Day at Ascot, black straw bonnets with swooping veils. The cathedral was awash in a sea of pearls, from pearls as small as peppercorns to pearls like huge champagne corks, black and white pearls on hundreds of wrists, necks, and earlobes; women wearing strands of pearls the width of a lingerie strap, a curtain tieback, a first-prize ribbon. Every detail paid tribute to the woman who had awed the world for years in a summation