#101 Warren Buffett (The Tao of Warren Buffett)

**David Senra** (0:01)
David Clark kept notebooks filled with Warren's wisdom on investing, which were meticulous and endlessly fascinating to read. Out of all of David's notebooks, my favorite was filled with many of Warren's most profound aphorisms, which were great fun to read because they had a way of really making you think. These aphorisms were akin to the teachings of a Taoist master, in that the more the student contemplates them, the more they reveal.
And the more I heard Warren speak, the more I learned. Not only about investing, but about business and life.
His aphorisms have a way of staying with you. I often find myself quoting them to make a point or thinking back on them to warn myself not to make a mistake.
David and I thought it would be fun to create the Tao of Warren Buffett, filling it with what we think are Warren's most enlightening aphorisms on investing, business management, choosing a career, and pursuing a successful life.
These words have been true friends to us over the years as we've navigated our ways through life and business.
All right, so that is from the introduction of the book that I read this week and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Tao of Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett's words of wisdoms, quotations and interpretations to help guide you to billionaire wealth and enlightened business management. I don't know if that's a great subtitle or not. And it was written by Mary Buffett and David Clark.
Mary Buffett is Warren's former daughter-in-law. And you actually might recognize the name David Clark because David also wrote the book that I covered on Founders number 78, which is The Tao of Charlie Munger. And ever since I read The Tao of Charlie Munger, I knew I was going to read The Tao of Warren Buffett. I just didn't know when. And I think this week is a good week to read it because I need to come up for air for a little bit because the last three weeks, I've read some of the longest books I've read for the podcast. The biography of Enzo Ferrari is the longest single book I've read for the podcast outside of the book that contains 54 years of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. The biography by Carol Shelby, it's also huge, takes hours and hours, you know, you're talking 10 to 20 hours to read. Same thing for Snowball, which was Warren Buffett's biography last week. This book is just what Mary said in the introduction. It's a short little book of aphorisms. And I actually think there's a lot of, I would like to see a lot more books written in this length. It is, she takes 125 of her favorite, of their favorite aphorisms, and then expounds on them, you know, but every single aphorism, they cover in less than a page. And I really like the idea of having like a book, you know, you could sit down and read it in one sitting in like two hours, something like that. And I would like to see more books condensed down to that. I don't know if you could do that for biographies because you need, you know, you're usually working with decades and decades of somebody's life. And as such, like there's gonna be a lot of detail, but if you're trying to get a, if you have an idea that is maybe longer than a blog post and shorter than a traditional book, I'd love to see other people write, you know, these short little books, because I think they have a lot of value. In fact, if you were to ask me the question, what is the book that you gave away most as a gift?
It's actually Nassim Taleb's book of aphorisms called The Bed of Procrustes. That book sits out in my living room, and I just pick it up every once in a while. You just read a bunch of aphorisms. Maybe you read, you know, for two or three minutes, and you just let your brain do these computations, because like what Mary was saying, like you find yourself thinking deeper, like there's so much interesting information contained in such short sentences that you wind up thinking about it, you know, many hours, even days or weeks after you put the book down. So anyways, let me go ahead and jump right into the book. I just pulled out, you know, some, a bunch of the aphorisms that I found that I want to remember personally. So we're gonna start with how the format of the book works is I'm gonna read the quote, and then sometimes I'm going to read like how they expound on that quote. So this is the first one. This is a quote from Warren. It says, the great personal fortunes in this country weren't built on a portfolio of 50 companies. They were built by someone who identified one wonderful business.