#100 Warren Buffett (The Snowball)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
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 built Berkshire Hathaway, a money-making machine sprang up without design. Its elegant structure of true partnership with like-minded shareholders, built on what Charlie Munger calls a seamless web of deserved trust, with an investment portfolio buried deep inside an interlocked set of businesses whose capital could be moved at will. All of this turbocharged with float.
And all of this had come about, he claims, simply as a reflection of his personality. The final product was a model that could be analyzed and understood, yet few did. What people paid attention to was simply how rich he was.
He wanted them to study his model.
The truth is this, when Warren was a little boy, fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging newspapers day after day, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth, with his whole heart, he would have said yes.
That passion led him to study a universe of a thousand stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get.
He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else's eyes.
He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Coke.
He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody's manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation.
Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives.
He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart.
He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business, art, literature, science, travel, architecture.
He ignored it all so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk, he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business, what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus the other. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had.
In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money.
All of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament and skills.
All right, so that was an excerpt from the book that I read this week and the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder.