I think what best encapsulates Buffet‘s “business of life” is a reply he gave students when asked sometime in 2003 what had been his greatest success and greatest failure. He didn’t tell them of his business mistakes (which usually he did), instead he said:
“Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.
I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account it, your life is a disaster.
That’s the ultimate test if how you have lived your life. The trouble with love is that you can’t buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.”
As to why life is like a snowball, here’s what he has to say:
“The snowball just happens if you’re in the right kind of snow, and that’s what happened with me. I don’t just mean compounding money either. It’s in terms of understanding the world and what kind of friends you accumulate. You get to select over time, and you’ve got to be the kind of person that the snow wants to attach itself to. You’ve got to be your own wet snow, in effect. You’d better be picking up snow as you go along, because you’re not going to be getting back up to the top of the hill again. That’s the way life works.”
Take it from the world's second wealthiest person. :)
