원문 보기
Let me tell you a story that I tell young lawyers who frequently come to me and say, "How can I quit practicing law and become a billionaire instead?" And so I say, "Well, that reminds me of a story they told about Mozart." Young man came to him and he said, "I want to compose symphonies and I want to talk to you about that." And Mozart said, "How old are you?" And the man said, "22." And Mozart said, "You're too young to do symphonies." And the guy says, "But you were writing symphonies when you were 10 years old." He says, "Yes, but I wasn't running around asking other people how to do it." Carol, we wish you well.
And but and we and actually we really do because the fact you asked that sort of a question isn't to some extent indicative of the fact you got the right attitude going in. It isn't that easy to be a great investor. I sold securities for a while. But in in May of 1956, I had a number of members of my family.
I'd come back from New York and they wanted me to help them out with stocks as I had earlier before I taken a job in New York. And I said I did not want to get in the stock sales business, but I I I wanted to I I enjoyed investing. I was glad to figure out a way to do it and which I did through a partnership form.
But I would not have done that if I thought there was any chance really that I would lose them money. And what I was worried about was not how I would behave but how they would behave because I want I needed people who were in sync with me. So when we sat down for dinner in May of 1956 with seven people who either were related to me or one was a roommate college and his mother and uh uh I I showed him the partnership agreement.
I said you don't need to read this. You know there's no way that I'm doing anything in the agreement that there's any way that you know you don't need a lawyer to read or anything of the sort. But I said, "Here are the ground rules as to what I think I can do and how I want to be judged and if you're in sync with me, I want to manage your money because then I I won't worry about the fact that you will panic if the market goes down or somebody tells you something different." So, we have to be on the same page.
And if we're on the same page, then I'm not worried about managing your money. And if we aren't on the same page, I don't want to manage your money because you may be disappointed when I think that things are even better to be investing and so on. So I don't think I don't think you want I don't think you want to manage other people's money until you have a vehicle and can reach the kind of people that will be in sync with you.
I think you ought to have your own ground rules as to what your expectations are when they should send you roses and when they should throw bricks at you and you want you want to be on the same and and uh that's one reason I never we didn't have a single institution in the partnership because institutions meant committees and committees meant that
you had some aunts that trusted you. What's that? You had some aunts who trusted you. Yeah. Well, and a father-in-law that gave me everything he had in the world, you know, but and I I didn't mind taking everything he had in the world as long as he would stick with me, uh, and wouldn't get panicked by headlines and and that sort of thing.
And and so it's very it's enormously important that you don't take people that have expectations of you that you can't meet. And that means you turn down a lot of people. That means you'd probably start very small and you get an audited record. And when you've got the confidence where if your own parents came to you and they were going to give you all their money and you were going to invest for them, you've got the kind of confidence that you'll say, "I may not get the best record, but I'll be sure that you get a decent record over time." Uh, that's when you're ready to go on it.
It's absolutely true that that uh virtually any any yard stick you use, I'm going downhill. Uh and the you know, if I would take a SAT test now and you could compare it to a score of when I was in my early 20s, I I think it'd be quite embarrassing. Uh, and it certainly Charlie and I can give you a lot of examples and there's others we won't tell you about uh how things decline as you get older.
But I would I would say this, it's absolutely true in my view that that uh you can and should understand human behavior better as you do get older. just had more experience with it and I don't think you can read Charlie and I read every book we could on every subject we were interested in you know when we were very young and we learned a an enormous amount just from what from other studying the lives of other of other people and but I don't think you can really I don't think uh you can get to be an expert on human behavior at all uh by reading books no matter what your IQ is no matter who the teacher is.
And uh I think that you really do learn a lot about human behavior sometimes you have to learn it by having multiple experiences. Um, I think you I think I actually think I despite all the other shortcomings and I can't do mental arithmetic as fast as I used to and I can't can't read as fast as I used to.
But I I do think that I know a lot more about human behavior than I did when I was 25 or 30. If you want one mantra, it comes from a Chinese gentleman who just died, Lee Kuan Yu, who was the greatest nation builder probably that ever lived in the history of the world. And he said one thing over and over and over again all his life.
Figure out what works and do it. You just go at life with that simple philosophy from your own national group. You will find it works wonderfully well. figure out what works and do it. And figuring out what works means figuring out how other people of course behave, of course. And Charlie and I have seen the extremes in human behavior.
And uh in so many unexpected ways. And now we get it every night. Yeah. Extremes of human behavior. Yeah. All we got to do is turn on the television. Yeah. I'm glad to use that example. I like our Apple holdings very much. I mean, it is our largest holdings. And actually, what hurts in the case of Apple is that the stock has gone up and we'd much rather have the stock, and I'm not proposing anything be done about it, but we'd much have rather have the stock at a lower price so we could buy more stock.
And importantly, uh, if Apple, I think they authored another authorized another 75 billion the other day, but let's say they're going to spend a hundred billion dollars in buying in their stock in the next three years. You know, it's very simple. If they buy it at 200, they're going to get 500 million shares.
They got 4 billion, 600 million out now. And so they'll end up with 4.1 billion under that circumstance. They're buying it at 150. they'd buy in 667 million shares and instead of owning what we would own in the first case, we'd now the divisor would be less than 4 billion and we'd own a greater percentage of it.
So in effect, a a major portion of of earnings at least possibly has been it's at least been authorized will be spent in terms of increasing our ownership without us paying out a dime which I love for a business a wonderful business and uh the recent development and the stock has moved up substantially actually hurts Bergkshire over time.
We'll still do, my opinion, we'll do fine, but we're not going to get into uh uh we're not going to dissect uh our expectations about Apple, you know, for people who may be buying it against us tomorrow or something. So, we we don't we don't give away investment advice on that for nothing. But we have all the pro all the things you've mentioned obviously we we know about.
We know some We've got a whole bunch of other variables that we crank into it. And we like the fact that it's our largest holding. Charlie, well, in my family, the people who have Apple phones, it's the last thing they'll give up.
Comments 0