What Makes Warren Buffett Tick

The Buffetts in 1937 (left to right): sister Bertie, Warren, mother Leila, and sister Doris.

I recently finished reading “The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder.   By all accounts this may be the one book that comes closest to a Buffett autobiography, as he gave the author full access and encourages her to write about “the less flattering version”.

The book is a long, deep read about his business and personal life, leaning more towards the personal side and its effects on his business deals.  After I finished the book, I read many of the reviews on Amazon and was struck by the lack of commentary about how his early childhood affected his life.  I’ll talk about that in a second.

To begin with, I think you can read the book looking through two sets of lenses.  One pair of lenses is rose colored, and the other pair is like the bifocals that I have found I need to start wearing because they bring things more into focus.  (I am still in denial about this by the way).

The first, rose colored, way to read this book is to look for clues of what makes Buffett a legendary investor and how you might apply those lessons to your career or personal investments.  That is how I assume most people read this book, and is what I call the light version.  There is a lot of great information you can learn from Buffett’s life story about the need to focus, how to find “cigar butt” investments, what constitutes a good company manager, and much more. Warren Buffett often gets noted for his incredible focus, and that is attributed to the drive he had from a young age.

Then there is the second way, with bifocals, and that version is dark.   The author Alice Schroeder covers Buffett’s personal life in great detail, including his early childhood.  Buffett was born in 1930 during the Great Depression, and that extremely difficult environment played a role in how he viewed life as it did my grandparents and most others that survived that era.   But Warren Buffett had a second, even greater difficulty with his home life.

Warren was a middle child with an older sister Doris and younger sister Roberta (Bertie).  They grew up in what was described as a very cold household with no outward displays of affection for the kids from either his father Howard or mother Leila.  His mother Leila took it a step further and verbally abused Doris and Warren regularly from the time they were very young.  She had a bad temper and would “verbally lash the children over and over again… they were worthless, ungrateful, and selfish, and should feel ashamed.”  The author goes on to say:

“While it was apparent that her attacks were deliberate, and she had some degree of control over them, it isn’t at all clear how she perceived her behavior as a parent.  But no matter what she thought she was doing, by the time Warren was three years old and their sister Roberta, known as Bertie, was born, “it couldn’t be put back together” he says, for him or for Doris.  The damage to their souls was done.”

As a parent of three young kids myself, that’s hard to read.  If you then make some assumptions on how that affected his life, you come to some stark conclusions.  A psychologist friend of mine surprised me when he said that likely Warren Buffett has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).   Given his childhood, he is most likely obsessed with the need to feel secure.  He feeds that obsession with compulsively pursuing money.  He built what eventually became an empire of businesses around him and insulated himself from his family.   Throughout his life, his relationship with his own kids and grandkids has unfortunately been horrible.

That part of the story gets glossed over somewhat and you realize it could be because the author is a close friend of Warren’s and doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.   But if it were talked about more, I think Warren Buffett’s life story would look a lot more ordinary and would teach an even more valuable lesson – the lesson of family.

Rather than what happened to him, and what he did to his kids and wife (which I didn’t even get in to, but suffice it to say he stayed married but really wasn’t “married” for over 30 years), there are these four (negative) Lessons from Warren:

1)      Love your kids and demonstrate it to them every day.

2)      Love your wife and demonstrate it to her every day.

3)      Always prioritize family.

4)      Then, and only then, work hard, get smarter, be driven, focused, and determined.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

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Tagged as: Entrepreneur, Family, Warren Buffett