my dad had various nicknames for me he'd call me fireball sometimes because i'd start little businesses he didn't care about money at all he believed very much in having an inner score card and i never worry about what other people are thinking about you you know just just if you know why you're doing what you're doing that's good enough when i want to do something i always want to do it big i've said many times that 65 or 70 and the people that you want to have love you actually do love you you're a success
some people should not own stocks at all because they just get too upset with price fluctuations if you're going to do dumb things because your stock a stock goes down you shouldn't own a stock at all the first books i read on investment were actually in my dad's office i just read and read and read i probably read five to six hours a day i mean i figured out very early you don't have to be that smart of this business which is fortunate but you do have to have the right temperament the best gift i
was ever given was to have a father that i had when i was born known as the oracle of omaha the 91 year old warren buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time he went from buying his first stock at age 11 to running berkshire hathaway a multinational holding company with total assets nearing one trillion dollars often appearing on lists alongside bill gates and elon musk his current net worth is 105 billion dollars placing him as the seventh richest person in the world despite such enormous wealth he maintains a simple lifestyle he
lives in the same home that he bought back in 1958 for 31 500 he makes his daily commute in his 2014 cadillac xts often stopping by mcdonald's for breakfast before heading into the office so for someone with such a simple routine and more money than he could possibly spend what makes him happy i would have to be honestly say that that what makes me happiest is what i'm doing what i'm doing i know i'll win over time doesn't mean i'll beat everybody else or anything like that but i i mean the game is very very
very easy if you have the right lessons in your mind about what you're buying i'm not buying stocks on my pieces of overwhelmingly american business uh and i'm happy when that's happening and when that's uh when i'm doing it i'm happy when stocks are going down i'm happier when stocks are going down because i i can buy more of them with the same amount of money i'd be happy if i was a farmer i'd want farmland to go down uh so i could buy more acreage you know if i was i having it just makes
sense the best votes you can have is your own talent you know i mean it's they can't they can't take it away from you they inflation can't take it from you taxes can't take it from you so i i when i talk to students i see these students and i tell them you know you're a million dollar asset i would pay you a hundred thousand dollars the mbas for 10 of the earnings for the rest of your life so that makes you a million dollar asset now if you can do something to increase that value
50 if you can learn to communicate better verbally or in written form and you become 50 more that's 500 000 just by improving yourself i mean not nobody can take that away from you and and so i urge everybody you know and then i talked to him in high school about this and and and colleges just do develop develop the habits you've got the brain power you got the energy but develop the habits of success and then look around you at the people that you admire you know and list what makes you admire them compared
to somebody else that looks equally strong or equally talented and those are those are things that you can do i mean just write them down and and you know people like people that are they like them if they're that they're humorous and they're friendly if they're if they're uh if they give credit to the other fellow i mean i and and they don't like them if they're stingy you know or they overstate and over promise and all those sort of things well that's decision that's a decision you make so so i i encourage everybody to
build your own mode around yourself accumulating such a large net worth doesn't happen if you're average at what you do clearly warren buffett is at the top of the investing game here's some of his best investing advice all you have to do is just buy a cross-section of america and then never listen to people like me or read the papers or do anything subsequently they think they think that because you can trade you should trade you buy a farm you buy an apartment house you can't resell it tomorrow and you know the cost of moving
around or you now you get something handed to your liquidity you know which is instant you can sell and the cost of doing it are pennies you know compared to other kinds of investment activity so because they can so easily move around they do move around and moving around is not smarter than investing by far the best investment you can make is in yourself i mean that for example communication skills i tell the students that come that they're going to graduate schools and business and they're learning all these complicated formulas all that if they just
learn to communicate better and both in writing and person they increase their value at least 50 percent no i mean if you can't communicate somebody who says you know it's like winking at a girl in the dark nothing happens you know basically and and you have to be able to get get both your ideas and uh and that's that's relatively easy i did it myself it's just hugely important and you if you invest in yourself nobody can take it away from you well life advice is uh you know the most important thing uh it's really
who you associate with you want to associate with people that are better than you are i mean basically you'll go in the direction of the people that you associate with and and you want to have the right heroes uh you want people if you want to emulate somebody you better pick very carefully who you want to emulate and obviously you can't pick your parents uh they're going to have an enormous influence on you but you don't get a choice on that but you get choices as you go down the line and you who you uh
who you admire who you who who you want to copy and the most important for most people in terms of that decision is their spouse it's also important in terms of a partner in business with the partner in life is is the most important you want to pick a spouse that's a little bit better than you are and then he or she and you hope they don't figure it out too fast i'll leave you with this metaphor warren uses to encourage everyone to take care of themselves i was in high school almost a third as
long as the country has been around and when i was in high school i really only had two things on my mind girls and cars and and it wasn't doing very well with girls so we'll talk about cars but let's just imagine that when we finish i'm going to let each one of you pick out the car of your choice sounds good doesn't it uh pick it out any color you name it it'll be tied up with a bow and it'll be at your house tomorrow and you say well what's the catch and the catch
is that it's the only car you're going to get in your lifetime now what are you going to do knowing that that's the only car you're ever going to have and you love that car you're going to take care of it like you cannot believe now what i'd like to suggest you're not going to get only one car in your lifetime but you've got to get one body and one mind and that's all you're going to get and that body and mind feels terrific now but it has to last you a lifetime you get exactly
one mind of one and one body in this world and and you can't start taking care of it when you're 50 by that time you'll rush it out if you haven't done anything so you should just really make sure that you just remember that you just got one mind and body to get through life within you to do the most with it you
