The Snowball

The Snowball is the only authorized biography of Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” legendary value investor and once richest man on earth, detailing his life from the very humble beginnings all the way to his unfathomable success.

With a stockbroker father and a loving, but overbearing mother, the two defining traits of a young Warren Buffett were introversion and an interest in numbers. He memorized entire pages from a book about baseball statistics his grandfather gave him at age eight and loved visiting his Dad’s office. As a natural consequence, Warren started making money at a very early age:

At nine, he sold gum and Coke. At ten, he sold peanuts at football games. At eleven, he’d saved $120 – about $2,000-$4,000 in today’s worth. At twelve, he delivered newspapers and sold subscriptions – earning $175/month, more than most of his teachers at the time.

Warren was lucky to find his passion – making, calculating, investing and growing money – early on in life. Most of us don’t, but even those of us who do, often put off starting. Warren didn’t just read. He closed the books, went outside and started doing.

No matter at what point in your life you’re reading this: If you have even the hint of a gut feeling of what it is you want to do with your life, go for it. Start now. Not tomorrow, but today. It’s the earliest it’ll ever be.

And if you haven’t, just pick something you enjoy. Passion has a way of finding us, once we start working.

If there’s one guiding value, a North star, that’s floating above Warren Buffett’s life, it has to be patience. Time and time again, he chose to sacrifice a good today for a better tomorrow. For example, his mentor Ben Graham taught him that good businesses are like thrown away cigar butts: people think they’re worthless, but there are still a few puffs in them. Warren would only invest in businesses, which had more intrinsic than perceived value, and those don’t come by all too often. But he patiently waited for the right opportunity, not just the next one. He also told all of his early partners that each and every dollar made from his investments would go right back into further investments and that he intended to never cash out on stocks. When Berkshire Hathaway, the textile business he’d bought with a steep discount of $10 million, wasn’t doing well, he patiently continued to invest instead of injecting capital. The managers of his companies he patiently got to know before settling on new ventures to invest in. And the SEC investigation in 1974 and the newspaper lawsuit ending in 1981?…