The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [505]
Warren Buffett was a timid man who shied from confrontation and needed people to cushion him from life’s rougher edges. His fears were personal, not financial; he was never timid when it came to money. His passionate yearning to be rich gave him the courage to ride his bicycle past the house with the awful dog and throw those last few newspapers in Spring Valley. It sent him to Columbia, seeking Ben Graham, after Harvard turned him down. It made him put one foot in front of the other, calling on people as a prescriptionist, while they rejected him over and over. It gave him the strength to return to Dale Carnegie after losing his courage the first time. It forced him through the decisions in the Salomon crisis to make his great withdrawal from the Bank of Reputation. It lent him the dignity to face years of almost intolerable criticism without counterattacking during the Internet bubble. He had spent his life contemplating, limiting, and avoiding risk, but in the end he was braver than he realized himself.
Warren Buffett would never call himself courageous; he would cite his energy, focus, and rational temperament. Above all, he would describe himself as a teacher. All his adult life he had sought to live up to the values instilled in him by his father: He said that Howard taught him that the “how” mattered more than the “how much.” To hold his ruthlessness in check wasn’t an easy lesson for him. It helped that he was fundamentally honest—and that he was possessed by the urge to preach. “He deliberately limited his money,” says Munger. “Warren would have made a lot more money if he hadn’t been carrying all those shareholders and had maintained the partnership longer, taking an override.” Compounded over thirty-three years, the extra money would have been worth many billions—tens of billions—to him.27 He could have bought and sold the businesses inside Berkshire Hathaway with a cold calculation of their financial return without considering how he felt about the people involved. He could have become a buyout king. He could have promoted and lent his name to all sorts of ventures. “In the end,” says Munger, “he didn’t want to do it. He was competitive, but he was never just rawly competitive with no ethics. He wanted to live life a certain way, and it gave him a public record and a public platform. And I would argue that Warren’s life has worked out better this way.”28
It was the will to share what he knew in an act of sheer generosity that made him spend months writing his annual letter to the shareholders; his joy in showmanship that made him want a mobile home at his shareholder meeting; his pixieish sense of fun that led him to endorse a mattress. It was his Inner Scorecard that made him cling to his margin of safety. It was pure love that turned him into what Munger called “a learning machine.” It was his handicapping skill that let him use that knowledge to figure out what the future might bring. It was his urge to preach that made him want to warn the world of dangers to come.
When Warren reached his seventy-seventh birthday, he mused that he had lived one-third of the lifespan of the United States. His age weighed on him; it was getting harder for him to read all day long the way he used to, since one of his eyes was getting a little weak. So he read more efficiently. He had finally given in and agreed to wear hearing aids. His voice turned gravelly faster than it once did. He tired more easily. But his business judgment was still quick and sharp.
He wished