After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.
Never ask the barber if you need a haircut.
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 you don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you are going to get somebody without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.
So now I would rather buy a wonderful business at a fair price, than a fair business at a wonderful price.
I have an old fashioned belief that I only should expect to make money in things that I understand. And when I say understand, I don't mean understand, you know, what the product does or anything like that. I mean understand what the economics of the business are likely to look like 10 years from now or 20 years from now.
But the biggest mistakes we've made by far, I've made not we've made, are mistakes of omission and not commission. I mean it's the things I knew enough to do, they were within my circle of competence, and I was sucking my thumb. And those are the ones that hurt. They don't show up any place.
Big opportunities in life have to be seized.
Our kids are great. But I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home - I would say it's neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money.
Well, when we got married in 1952, I told Susie I was going to be rich. That wasn't going to be because of any special virtues of mine or even because of hard work, but simply because I was born with the right skills in the right place at the right time. I was wired at birth to allocate capital and was lucky enough to have people around me early on - my parents and teachers and Susie - who helped me to make the most of that.
I still believe in the philosophy - FORTUNE quoted me saying this 20 years ago - that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.
My kids are going to carve out their own place in this world, and they know I'm for them whatever they want to do. But setting up heirs with a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb can be harmful for them and is an antisocial act. The perfect amount to leave children is enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.
Some material things make my life more enjoyable; many, however, would not. I like having an expensive private plane, but owning a half-dozen homes would be a burden...Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner. The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.
You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
Count the number of people who love you. And to be loved, you have to be lovable.