Book Review: Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
By the time Warren Buffet was 17, he had read more than a hundred business books. By age 11, he was earning and saving. By age 14, he began paying taxes to the US Government. When he graduated high school, he had 5,000 dollars he had saved from his newspaper sales business.
Even before he had $100,000, Warren Buffet worried that becoming rich would spoil his children. Warren Buffet had always loved numbers. Before he was ten, he knew the statistics of every state in the US. Numbers were his thing. He reduced everything to number value. Years later, after computers were invented, Warren refused to use them because he did not need them; his brain could compute any number he wanted.
Influenced By His Father
The two people who had the biggest influence on Warren Buffet were Howard Buffett and Ben Graham. Howard Buffett was Warren's father. The Great Depression shaped his life. The father was a strict, disciplinarian father who had defined principles that he expected his children to follow. He was aloof about life, intellectual, and seemed to have a defining purpose for life. Warren inherited all of those. It is remarkable the influence that parents have on their children. If you are a parent, watch out for the kind of parent you are.
Influenced by Ben Graham
Ben Graham, the author of "The Intelligent Investor," is the second man who had the biggest influence on Warren Buffet's life. Warren Buffet followed Ben's principles for his investments. In the business world, Ben Graham was his oracle. Although Warren would fine-tune Ben's principles, his thinking was largely shaped by Ben Graham. Good thing it worked. The lesson here is that we don't need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to find out what's working and use it. Look for patterns. Look for solutions that have worked. Implement them.
Family
As a father, Warren Buffet was aloof. He did not have a good relationship, or rather, any relationship, with his children. One time, his son was at the bookshop with his mum when he saw a book on parenting; he told his mum that he wanted to buy that book for his dad. This was a sober acknowledgment of how his father seemed not to know how to do this parenting thing. Warren was too intellectual, he was so into his work that he did not know how to relate to his family and did not seem to have the acumen for human relationships. As the years went by, he became a better man and father.
Reading
Warren Buffet is an obsessive reader. Obsessive. He once told a group of students, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest." Indeed, if there were ever any "secret” to Warren Buffet's success, it would be this one-reading! Warren read more than the average CEO. In signing deals worth millions and billions, Warren did not need a “team" or “body of lawyers" or “consultants”; he read everything by himself. He reads thousands of annual letters every year, something that even those who write them hardly read.
Do It For A Long Time
Warren Buffet has been investing and standing by certain principles for a very long time. He is 92 years old. He started investing by the age of 11. He has been investing for 8 decades. We should not be surprised at how successful Warren Buffet has become. We would be surprised if he wasn’t. Longevity has its reward. Doing something for so long deserves its reward.
Perhaps that's the biggest lesson we can learn from Warren Buffet. Start early and do it for a long time. Especially today, when everyone is for some “quick hack” or “fastest way”, going the old, slow, steady way may be the best. And if you think about it, this means anyone can become wealthy. Maybe not as rich as Buffet, but anyone who follows the right principles for a period should be able to buy the basic necessities of life.
