The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [485]
On the second day, Susie Jr. got a golf cart to take her mother around. When Susie Jr. walked into the condo to pick her mother up, she was shriveled in a little ball on the couch crying, saying, “I can’t do it.”13 Even though she spent much of the trip resting, it drained her tiny store of energy.
When the family returned to Omaha, with everybody on hand for the upcoming premiere of Peter’s show, Susie took the opportunity to visit her daughter’s new knitting shop. Susie Jr. had gotten together with a partner to open String of Purls in a suburban shopping center. Buffett was genuinely excited at his daughter’s entrepreneurialism. He could relate to a knitting shop. He had analyzed its prospects and thought it might gross as much as half a million dollars a year. Once again he could bond with his daughter in a special way. He was as enthused over the knitting business as any other business: It attracted him for the same reason he pored over GEICO’s reports and tracked the growth of their Internet sales week by week; monitored the See’s Candies sales at every single retail store every single day during the holiday season; read the daily sales figures by fax from Shaw Carpets; reviewed the daily reports from Borsheim’s before Christmas; memorized real estate listing statistics from Home Services of America (the real-estate company that MidAmerican Energy owned); recited jet-fuel costs and ownership statistics for NetJets; and knew ad lineage from the Buffalo News by heart.
Peter’s multimedia event was nothing like the knitting shop; it was harder for Buffett to comprehend. Based on the PBS special Peter had done earlier, it had consumed four years of effort, during which he focused on improving the execution and experience of the live performances while refining the music and story line. And all of this work would have no certain result—except the satisfaction of the creative act.
Buffett had seen the earlier live performances and knew the show involved Peter on keyboards with a band; a special theater shaped like a tent; lasers, drums, video, and Native American singers and dancers. Warren always gave students advice to pursue their passion, but the examples of passion he used, like becoming backgammon champion of the world, were competitive at their core. Someone driven by an inner fire of artistry, irrespective of the world’s rewards, was simply off the map of his reality. That was Susie’s territory, the realm of spirit and soul and heart, of the poet in her lonely room, of the painter striving for self-expression on canvas for years with no public recognition of his work. Nonetheless, his own passion and patience and creativity as he worked with capital resembled Peter’s passion and patience and artistic vision with music. Thus, Buffett’s genuine wish for Peter’s success found its expression in the best and only way he knew—in the marriage between art and commerce. The show’s potential for commercial success preoccupied him. “I’ve seen it several times, and I’ve seen different iterations of it almost every time. It gets enthusiastic responses, but what I don’t know is just how big the market is. It’s not like a Broadway musical, in terms of the depth of the market, so we will find out.”
The Buffett name had worked heavily against Peter when it came to raising money, because people assumed that he had easy access to unlimited funds. People did not take him seriously about not having money until he actually mortgaged his house to fund the show. Warren, typically, offered to pay the last ten