He is considered to be the single most successful investor of the 20th century. He is also one of the wealthiest men in the world. He started learning about investing when he was 7 and invested for the first time at age 11. Warren Buffett truly has a strong set of rules for success. Here is his top 10 rules for success.
1. Find Your Passion.
You are lucky in life when you find your passion in life. You need to find something you like or you will be in trouble. You need to take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy. You will get into trouble if you try to work a job for money but you dislike the job.
2. Hire Well.
The three things you need to look for in employees are integrity, intelligence and energy. If the person doesn’t have the first one, the latter two will destroy you. If they do not have integrity, then you want them to be dumb and lazy, not smart and energetic.
3. Don’t Care What People Think.
It never bothered me if people disagreed with what I thought as long as I stayed with the facts. Stay within your circle of competence. I’m no genius, but I’m smart in spots and I stay around those spots. Look at the facts.
4. Read, Read, Read.
I read on average 5 to 6 hours a day. I read 5 daily newspapers, a fair number of magazines, I read 10K’s and annual reports. I also love biographies.
5. Have a Margin of Safety.
You wouldn’t drive a truck that was 9900 pound across a bridge that said limit 10,000 pounds because you can’t be that sure about it. So you would go down a little farther to the bridge that says it holds 20,000 pounds to cross.
6. Have a Competitive Advantage.
The nature of capitalism is all about someone coming and trying to take the castle. If you sell TV’s, then five people will come along and try to sell a less expensive TV than you. What you need is a castle that has some durable competitive advantage, what you need is a castle that has a mote around it. Sometimes that mote could be that you are the lowest costing producer of your product, or that you have knocked everyone else out of the ring for the past several years. It will be your competitive advantage as long as you can keep on doing it.
7. Schedule for Your Personality.
I don’t go to meetings, I hate them. My days are very unstructured. I read a lot. I don’t like to have things packed into every hour of the day. I keep things scheduled to my personality. I am most productive in that mode. It fits my personality.
8. Always Be Competing.
I try to study failures. The biggest thing that kills business is complacency. You always want to be on the move. The danger is always that you rest on your laurels. The key is to compete the same way when you are successful as you did when you first started.
9. Model Success.
Ben Graham was my mentor at the University of Nebraska. I read his book “The Intelligent Investor” and that did it for me. I even named my son after him. Look at the people you admire and emulate their qualities, you will find that you can do anything that they do.
10. Give unconditional love.
I learned a lot of lessons from my father. The greatest lesson that I learned from him was unconditional love. To know that no matter what you do, you can always go back home can be a powerful thing. Every parent that can extend that to their child will be giving them a very powerful gift.
There you have it, the top 10 rules that Warren Buffett lives and works by. All of these rules are sound principles of business. You should take a look at this list and see how many of them you can emulate in your own business. As Warren says, “emulate success,” and he is one of the most successful people in the world.
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