The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [503]
“I packed my little snowball very early, and if I had packed it ten years later, it would have been way different than where it stands on the hill right now. So I recommend to students that if you start out a little ahead of the game—it doesn’t have to be a lot, but it’s so much better than starting out behind the game. And credit cards really get you behind the game.”
As early as 2002, feeling a sense of urgency, he had begun to pick up speed with his talks to the students. They came from MIT. Northwestern. The University of Iowa. The University of Nebraska. Wesleyan. The University of Chicago. Wayne State. Dartmouth. The University of Indiana. The University of Michigan. Notre Dame. Columbia. Yale. The University of Houston. Harvard/ Radcliffe. The University of Missouri. The University of Tennessee. UC Berkeley. Rice. Stanford. Iowa State. The University of Utah. Texas A&M University. Much of his message was that getting rich quick wasn’t the worthiest goal in life. Ironically, it was his own competitiveness and the urge of humankind to worship the rich and famous that made his audience seek him out to hear these words. Like everything else in his life, the visits from students started to snowball.
In 2008, he was crowned the richest man on earth for the first time. By then, the students were coming from Asia, from Latin America, arriving in Omaha in groups of two or three schools at a time, in packs sometimes of more than two hundred, sometimes on several days a month.
The students who made the pilgrimage to visit the Sage of Omaha got the full treatment (excepting only that Buffett did not go to their hotels in person and leave bound volumes of his annual reports for them at the front desk at four-thirty a.m. The Internet now did that job for him). They toured Rose Blumkin’s Nebraska Furniture Mart and roamed the aisles of Borsheim’s. Buffett met them in the office. Some days now, he abandoned his gray suits and tight collars, and looked relaxed in casual dress. Their questions often ventured far afield from business. What is the purpose of life? some of them wanted to know. He answered this question the same way he answered the business ones—in mathematical terms.
As he had told the students at Georgia Tech when Susie was in the hospital, recovering from her surgery: “The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you.”
How should society be ordered? He told them about the Ovarian Lottery. How do I find the right spouse? Marry up, he said. (He wasn’t talking about money.) How do I know what is right? Follow your Inner Scorecard. What should I do about a career? Find something you are passionate about. I only work with people I like. If you go to work every morning with your stomach churning, you’re in the wrong business.
He told them about the genie. Treat your body like the only car you’ll ever own: Baby that car, garage it every night, buff every dent, and change its oil every week. Then he took them out to lunch or dinner at Gorat’s and everyone scarfed down salty T-bones and double hash browns at the scuffed linoleum tables as if the genie had exempted them temporarily from his rules. As they ate, they would leap up, one after another, and jockey to have a picture taken with Warren Buffett. Someday, maybe in forty years, their grandchildren would believe them when they claimed to have talked and sat and dined with the Oracle of Omaha.
What he was teaching were the lessons that had emerged from the unfolding of his own life.
In that unfolding, he admits to ambition, but he denies that there was ever a plan. He finds it hard to acknowledge his own powerful hand as the creator of the sweeping canvas that is his masterpiece. As he tells the story, a series of happy accidents