The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [463]
They asked him what had been his greatest success and greatest failure. He didn’t tell them about his business mistakes of omission this time. Instead he said:
“Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.
“I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.
“That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love is that you can’t buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.”13
Warren continued visiting every weekend after Susie went home to her sunshine-filled apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. The egg-yolk-yellow rugs were gone, lest their dust clog the trach tube. Chair elevators carried her up the four flights of stairs. The nurses used a rented suction-tracheotomy system. The doctors began to prepare Susie for the six-week course of radiation, which was intended to kill any remaining cancer cells. It would begin in December and continue through the holidays. The radiation, which she had never quite agreed to in the first place, was going to burn her throat. The doctors had told her to bulk up before the surgery because she could expect to lose around fifty pounds over the entire course of the surgery and radiation. That was a lot of weight, but one of the thoughts that had comforted her before the surgery was that she could afford to lose a good bit of it. Now, as the feeding tube came out, the nurses began to feed Susie six units of liquid meal replacement a day. It took her much of the day to get it down, because of the pain.
Under stress, Warren had gained a little weight. He felt that he needed to lose twenty pounds and had decided to diet alongside Susie’s liquid meal regimen. “That can’t be a lot of fun,” he said, “so I won’t have any fun either.”
Buffett’s manner of dieting was as eccentric and unhealthy as the rest of his eating habits. He decided to stick with his usual approach, which was to consume only a thousand calories a day and budget it however he liked. That meant he could spend the thousand calories on licorice, peanut brittle, hamburgers, or whatever else he wanted to eat so long as he didn’t exceed the self-imposed limit. The easiest step was to cut back on all the Cherry Coke, replacing it with nothing and thereby dehydrating himself. The idea behind the thousand-calorie starvation regimen was to get the pain of dieting over with fast. He was impatient and cut off debate over the health merits of such a diet. At my height and age, he said, I reckon that I can eat about a million calories a year and maintain my weight. (The nice round, even number of a million calories pleased him.) I can spend those calories however I want. If I want to eat a bunch of hot-fudge sundaes in January and starve the rest of the year, I can do that.
It was completely rational (on the surface) yet totally ludicrous. But since he had never been either seriously overweight or seriously ill, it was pointless to argue with him. (He went on this crash diet every year right before the shareholder meeting; it is possible, however, that all that dehydration may have had nothing