Don’t wait to get started if you want to be as rich as Warren Buffet. That’s the advice the legendary investor shared in 1999 at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting. Buffett had a net worth of about $30 billion at the time. Today, his fortune has grown to over $147 billion. When asked how to build such wealth, Buffett didn’t hesitate.
“Mr. Buffett, how can I make $30 billion?” someone asked. Buffett laughed and responded, “Start young.”
He then went on to explain his philosophy, using his signature snowball analogy. “Charlie’s always said that the big thing about it is we started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill,” Buffett said, referring to his longtime business partner, Charlie Munger. “So we started at a very early age in rolling the snowball down, and of course, the snowball – the nature of compound interest – is it behaves like a snowball of sticky snow.” The key, he explained, is having a “very long hill,” which means either starting early or living a long life.
But what if you’re not a teenage investing prodigy? Buffett laid out exactly how he’d approach investing if he were starting over with just $10,000. “I would do it exactly the same way if I were doing it in the investment world,” he said. “If I were getting out of school today and I had $10,000 to invest, I’d start with the A’s. I would start going right through companies.”
His strategy would be to focus on smaller companies, where “there’s more chance that something is overlooked.” He acknowledged that the investing landscape had changed since 1951, when he could leaf through stock listings and find obvious bargains. But the fundamental principle remained the same: “You have to buy businesses – or little pieces of businesses called stocks – and you have to buy them at attractive prices, and you have to buy into good businesses.” Even though he said this nearly 26 years ago, his advice still holds up. Some might argue that times have changed, but Buffett was clear: “That advice will be the same a hundred years from now, in terms of investing.”
Buffett also made it clear that successful investing is a solo effort. “You can’t expect anybody else to do it for you,” he warned. “People will not tell you about wonderful little investments. It’s not the way the investment business is set up.”
He illustrated this point with a personal story about discovering GEICO as a young investor. Excited about what he’d found, he went to major investment firms specializing in insurance stocks, expecting them to validate his insight. Instead, they dismissed him. “I thought I discovered this wonderful thing,” Buffett recalled. “And I see what these great investment houses that specialized in insurance stocks said, and they said I didn’t know what I was talking about. It wasn’t of any interest to them.”
His takeaway? Investors need to trust their own judgment. “You’ve got to learn what you know and what you don’t know, and within the arena of what you know, you have to just pursue it very vigorously and act on it when you find it,” Buffett said. “You can’t look around for people to agree with you. You can’t look around for people to even know what you’re talking about. You have to think for yourself.”
Even with a $147 billion fortune today, Buffett’s advice hasn’t changed. The secret to getting rich isn’t about chasing the latest market trends or relying on hot stock tips. It’s about patience, discipline and the power of compounding – rolling that snowball down a long hill.
Culled from YahooNews!