Many people would see this as totally unproductive, but many of my best business solutions and money problem answers have come from periods of just sitting and thinking.
—Warren Buffett
In a knowledge economy, learning and thinking are the best long-term investments you can make in your career. Learning and thinking determine our decisions, and those decisions, in turn, determine our results. Buffett spends the major part of his daily time reading and very little time actually taking action. He says, “In allocating capital, activity does not correlate with achievement. Indeed, in the fields of investments and acquisitions, frenetic behavior is often counterproductive.”3 Investing is a field in which success can flow from passively observing the world, reading, thinking, and doing nothing more than making an occasional telephone call. Most investors would perform better if they thought more and did less. One of the best hacks in the investment field is learning to be happy doing nothing.
Successful investing is a practical craft and is made up of heuristics: a tool kit of approximate, experience-based rules for making sense of the world. The rules are local rather than global and slowly change over time—they are sufficiently static to make experience valuable but sufficiently fluid to keep the craft interesting. Having a strong passion for lifelong learning is a durable competitive advantage for an investor. What differentiates successful investors from mediocre ones is passion. To be a truly passionate investor means you are always thinking about the future and the direction of the world. It means you are always enthusiastically observing everything around you. Investing isn’t just a process of wealth creation; it is a source of great happiness and sheer intellectual delight for the truly passionate investor. It is great to be passionate in life, but it is wise to be so only for things that are under our control, or else we risk being dejected because of unfavorable outcomes. Value investors derive satisfaction from the mental process of investing and from the learnings embedded in the outcomes. Those who love the process end up with results naturally, unlike others who worship only outcomes.
The only way to gain an edge is through long and hard work. Do what you love to do, so you just naturally do it or think about it all the time, even if you are relaxing…. Over time, you can accumulate a huge advantage if it comes naturally to you like this [emphasis added].
—Li Lu
Buffett has always held the opinion that the people who discover their passion in life are lucky. His early passion for money management resulted in his studying, by age eleven, every book the Omaha Public Library had on investing, some of them twice.
In an interview with Fortune magazine in 2012, Buffett was asked how other people can “tap dance to work” the way he does. He provided the following answer: “Follow your passion…. I always tell college students to take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy.”4 By doing that, the logic goes, you’ll bring more energy to your work than anybody else does. There is power in passion.
“The truth is, so few people really jump on their jobs, you really will stand out more than you think,” Buffett explains. “You will get noticed if you really go for it.”5
As the well-known saying goes, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” You know that you are doing things right in your life when you go to bed at night and cannot wait to wake up and live the next day.
Instead of merely trying to live a long life, we should endeavor to infuse life into our lives. Too often, life appears short to us because we all seem to have so much to do. But the reality is that life is long if you know how to use it well.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…. Life is long if you know how to use it.
—Seneca
Old too soon, wise too late. It is a sad irony that it often takes us a lifetime to learn to live in the moment. To just “be” in the moment. We put off “living happily ever after” for another year because we assume we have another year. We don’t tell the ones we love how much we love them often enough because we assume there’s always tomorrow. We ignore the warning of Socrates: “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” Having all the money in the world is pointless if you don’t have the time or the health to enjoy it. In appendix A of this book, I share a beautiful poem written by David Weatherford, which I read a few years ago and continue to read from time to time. It has inspired me to work toward changing my life—from deferring living for tomorrow to trying to live today as happily as possible.
We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we have only one.
—Confucius
When you find your North Star, that is, the most important thing that sets your life’s course, you learn where you’re headed. And that is such a good feeling. It is fine for your North Star to change over time. But whatever it is right now, let it guide you. Your North Star is highly meaningful and vital in a personal context, so aiming toward this beacon of light will bring great happiness to you every day.
Pursue your passion. You won’t get this time back ever again. Life is but a pause between the first breath and the last. The only thing you can guarantee at somebody’s birth is his or her death; everything else is unpredictable. They say life is a journey from B to D, that is, from birth to death. But what about the C that comes between B and D? It is choice. Our life is a matter of choices. Choose what makes you happy and your life will never go wrong. Some people die at age twenty-five but aren’t buried until they are seventy-five. Some people aren’t born until they are age twenty-five. Strive to be the latter.
One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.
—Gerard Way
In 2004, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was informed that he only had a few weeks to live. This is what Jobs told the audience during his 2005 Stanford commencement speech:
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart… [emphasis added].
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition [emphasis added]. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.6
Jobs was echoing the thoughts of Mark Twain, who said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Twain’s quote reminds me of one of my favorite advertisements. It came from United Technologies. It runs:
Most of us miss out on life’s big prizes. The Pulitzer.