Warren Buffett: A Bunch Of Qualities That Will Make You Rich

Video length: 00:04:59

Transcript

Play one game with me for just a minute and then we’ll get to your questions. I’d like for the moment to have you pretend that I’ve made you a great offer and I’ve told you that you could pick any one of your classmates - you now know each other probably pretty well after being here for a while - you can have 24 hours to think it over... You can pick any one of your classmates and you get 10 percent of their earnings for the rest of their lives. And I ask you what goes through your mind in determining which one of those you would pick. You can’t pick the one with the richest father, that doesn’t count. I mean you’ve got to do this on merit, but you probably wouldn’t pick the person that gets the highest grades in the class. I mean there's nothing wrong with getting the highest grades in the class. But that’s not going to be the quality that sets apart a big winner from the rest of the pack. Think about who you would pick and why. And I think you’ll find when you get through that you’ll pick some individual - you’ve all got the ability or you wouldn’t be here otherwise, and you’ve all got the energy. I mean you’ve got... the initiative is here, the intelligence is here, throughout the class. But some of you are going to be bigger winners than others. And it comes down to a bunch of qualities. That. Interestingly enough are self-made. I mean it’s not how tall you are, it's not if you can kick a football 60 yards, it’s not whether you can run a 100 yard dash in 10 seconds, it’s not whether you are the best looking person in the room. It’s a whole bunch of qualities that really come out of Ben Franklin or the boyscout code or whatever it may be. I mean it’s integrity, it's honesty, it’s generosity it’s. It’s being willing to do more than your share. It’s just all those qualities that are self selected. And then if you look on the other side of the ledger, because there’s always a catch to these. You know, free gifts and Jeannie jokes. And this is the fun part. You also have to sell short one of your classmates pay 10 percent of what they do. So what do you think is going to do the worst of the class, this is way more fun. And think about it again, and again it isn’t the person with the lowest grades or anything of the sort. It’s the person who just doesn’t shape up in the character department.

We look for three things when we hire people: we look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you because if you’re going to get somebody without integrity you want them lazy and dumb. I mean you don’t want them smart and energetic. So it's that third quality but everything about that quality is your choice. You can’t change the way you are wired much but you can change a lot of what you do with that wiring and it’s the habits that you generate now on those qualities or those negative qualities. I mean the person who always, you know, claimed credit for things they didn’t do, that always cuts corners, that you can’t count on. I mean in the end those things are habit patterns and the time to form the right habits is when you’re, when you’re your age. I mean it doesn’t do me much good to get golf lessons now. If I’ve gotten golf lessons when I was your age it might be a decent golfer.

Someone once said the chains of habit are too are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. And I see that all the time I see people with habit patterns that are self destructive. When they’re 50 or 60 and they really can’t change it. They’re in prison by that. But you’re not in prison by anything. So. When you write down the qualities of that person that you’d like to buy to 10 percent of... look at that list. And ask yourself is there anything on that list I couldn’t do. The answer is there won’t be. And when you look at the person who you sell short and you look at those qualities that you don’t like, if you see any of those in yourself: egotism, whatever it may be, selfishness, you can get rid of that. I mean that is not ordained. And if you follow that, and Ben Franklin did this and my old boss Ben Graham did this in their early ages, in their young teens they just looked around and he said "who do I admire?" You know, and, he wanted to be admired himself and he said you know "why do I admire these other people?" And he said "if I admire them for these reasons maybe other people will admire me if I behave in a similar manner." And he and he decided what kind of a person he wanted to be. And if you follow that, at the end you’ll be the person you want to buy 10 percent of. I mean that’s the goal at the end. And it’s something that’s achievable by everybody in this room. So that’s the end of the sermon.