1: Warren Buffett is one of the most successful business people in history. Berkshire Hathaway, the firm where he serves as Chairman, is valued at over $1 Trillion. Warren’s personal net worth is more than $150 Billion.
So how does this business titan spend his time?
We might be surprised, says Charlie Munger, his long-time business partner and former Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.
“If you watched him with a time clock, you’d find that about half of his waking time is spent reading,” Charlie told the 2007 USC School of Law graduates.
“Then a big chunk of the rest of his time is spent talking one-on-one, either on the telephone or personally, with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who trust him,” he recounts in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
“Viewed up close, Warren looks quite academic as he achieves worldly success.”
What is the reason he spends so much time reading?
“Warren Buffett had to be a continuous learning machine,” says Charlie.
“Consider Berkshire Hathaway,” he observes. “It may have the best long-term, big-assets-involving investment record in the history of civilization. The skill that got Berkshire through one decade would not have sufficed to get it through the next decade with comparable levels of achievement.”
2: Charlie believes the acquisition of wisdom is not just something we do. It is “a moral duty,” he states.
“Without lifetime learning,” he told the graduating class, “you are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know.”
Charlie observes: “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were that morning. And boy does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”
3: We have to love the subject we are learning about, he believes: “Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn’t excel in anything in which I didn’t have an intense interest. . . If at all feasible, you want to maneuver yourself into doing something in which you have an intense interest.”
He cites the example of Dr. Joseph M. Mirra, whom Charlie met while serving as chairman of a hospital. “This man, over years of disciplined work, made himself know more about bone tumor pathology than almost anyone else in the world. He wanted to pass this knowledge on to help treat bone cancer.
“How was he going to do it? Well, he decided to write a textbook, and even though I don’t think a textbook like this sells more than a few thousand copies, they do end up in cancer treatment centers all over the world. He took a sabbatical year and sat down at his computer with all his slides, carefully saved and organized. He worked 17 hours a day, seven days a week, for a year. Some sabbatical. At the end of the year, he had created one of the two great bone tumor pathology textbooks of the world.
Charlie quotes Alfred North Whitehead, who observed, “The rapid advance of civilization came only when man ‘invented the method of invention.'”
“He was referring to the huge growth in GDP per capita and many other good things we now take for granted,” Charlie notes. “Big-time progress started a few hundred years ago. Before that, progress per century was almost nil. Just as civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.”
Charlie considers himself lucky: “I came to law school having learned the method of learning, and nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What am I intensely interested in professionally? How can I dedicate myself to learning more?
Action: Commit to it. Today.
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