本書最後3.5頁堪稱菁華，透過感性筆調完整呈現了Warren Buffett’s business of life。你可能沒有時間再重讀一次這本磚塊書，但最後這個段落，值得在雪球滾累時重拾回味。
When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth – with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes.
That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him borrowed into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran the outpost of Grief Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had ready every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could leaned from their lives. he attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business – art, literature, science, travel, architecture – so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stop thinking about business, what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what make customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insight nobody else had. He developed a network of people – for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity – not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about way to make money. And all of his energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament and skills.
Warren Buffer was a man who loves money, a man for whom the game of collecting it ran in his veins as his lifeblood. That love kept him going: buying little stocks like National America, selling GEICO to have to money to buy something cheaper, pushing at the boards of the companies like Sanborn Map to do the right thing for the shareholders. It had made him independent and competitive enough to want his own partnership and say no to the chance to be a junior partner to run Ben Graham’s old firm. It made him tough enough to shut down Dempster’s distribution center and fire Lee Dimon; it gave him the determination to break Seabury Stanton. It had tamed his impatience and made him listen when Charlie Munger insisted they buy great businesses, even though listing to other people against his very grain. It stiffened his will to survive the SEC investigation of Blue Chip and to break the strike at the Buffalo News. It made him an implacable acquirer. It also made him to lower his standards from time to time when his turf dried up. Yet it saved him from serious losses by keeping him from abandoning his margin of safety.
Warren Buffet was a timid man who shied from confrontation and needed people to cushion him from life’s rougher edges. His fear was personal, not financial; he was never timid when it comes to money. His passionate yearning to be rich gave him the courage to ride his bicycle past the house with the awful dog and throw those last few newspapers in Spring Valley. It sent him to Columbia, seeking Ben Graham, after Harvard turned him down. It made put one foot in front of the other, calling on people at prescriptionist, while they rejected him over and over. It gave him the strength to return to Dale Carnegie after losing his courage the first time. It forced through the decisions in the Salomon crisis to make his great withdrawal from the Bank of Reputation. It lent him the dignity to face years of almost intolerable criticism without counterattacking during the Internet Bubble. He had spent his life contemplating, limiting, and avoiding risk, but in the end he was braver then he realized himself.
Warren Buffett would never call himself courageous; he would cite his energy, focus, and temperament. Above all, he would describe himself as a teacher. All his adult like to had sought to live up to the values in him by his father: He said that Howard taught him that the “how” matters more than the “how much”. To hold his ruthlessness in check wasn’t an easy lesson for him. It helped that he was fundamentally honest – and he was possessed by the urge to preach. “He deliberately limited his money,” says Munger. “Warren would have made a lot more money if he hadn’t been carrying all those shareholders and had maintained the partnership longer, taking an override.” Compounded over thirty-three years, the extra money would have been worth many billions – tens of billions – to him. He could have bought and sold the businesses inside Berkshire Hathway with a cold calculation of their financial return without considering how he felt about the people involved. He could have become a buying king. He could have promoted and lent his name to all sorts of ventures. “In the end, ” says Munger, “he didn’t want to do it. He was competitive, but he was never just rawly competitive with no ethics. He wanted to live life a certain way, and it gave him a public record and a public platform. And I would argue that Warren’s life was worked out better this way.”
It was the will to share what he knew in an act of sheer generosity that made him spend months writing his annual letter to the shareholders; his joy in showmanship that made him want a mobile home at his shareholder meeting; his pixieish sense of fun that led him to endorse a mattress. It was his Inner Scorecard that made him cling to his margin of safety. It was pure love that turned him into what Munger called “a learning machine.” It was his handpicking skill that let him use the knowledge to figure out what the future might bring. It was his urge to preach that made him want to warn the world of dangers to come.
When Warren reached his seventy-seventh birthday, he mused that he had lived one-third of the lifespan of the United States, His age weighed on him; it was getting harder for him to read all day long the way he used to, since one of his eyes was getting a little weak. So he read more efficiently, He had finally gave in and agreed to wear hearing aids. His voice turned gravelly faster then it once did. He tired more easily. But his business judgment was still quick and sharp. He wished he could have the next ten years’ worth newspapers delivered to his doorstep right now. The years ahead weren’t endless, but with luck they could be long. Trees don’t grow to the sky, but he wasn’t scraping the horizon yet. Another new person, another investment, another idea always waited for him. The things left to learn far exceeded what he already knew.
“The snowball just happens if you’re in the right kind of snow, and that 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.”
The snowball he had created so carefully was enormous by now. Yet his attitude toward it remained the same. However many birthdays lay ahead, he would always be astonished each time the calendar turned, and as long as he lived, he would never stop feeling like a sprout. For he wasn’t looking backward to the top of the hill. It was a big world, and he was just starting out.
The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, P. 827 ~ P. 830
