To a certain extent, Warren Buffet bewilders me. Although seemingly embodying all of the attributes of a good leader (and a track record bearing signs of financial wizardry), Mr. Buffet strikes me as somewhat of an anomaly. Lacking some of those deficiencies we sometimes like to ascribe to captains of business—in addition to his prescience, Buffet’s apparent lack of haughty egoism gives him an almost neighborly appeal—Buffet is a beloved by many of his peers, and, quite frankly, wonks everywhere. Unlike the figure of antiquity for whom he is named—Pythia, whose storied sulfur-fueled artificial powers of clairvoyance drew the attention of some of antiquities most prolific writers—the Oracle of Omaha gathers his power not by hanging precariously above volcanic, toxin-laden ground, but from a laser-focused intellect and perceptive disposition. Every year Buffett entertains approximately 160 students in Omaha, and plays Oracle, answering questions about his worldview, personal development, and of course, investment strategy (at the conclusion of the trip, he also makes himself available for goofy photographs).
The responses he supplied students this year, some of which were recently documented by Serena Ng of The Wall Street Journal, can be distilled into roughly three points, each of which is just as important as the other for new job-seekers to remember as they take their first steps as newly-minted graduates.
- Don’t lose perspective. After recalling his turbulent childhood—“I behaved pretty badly,” he says—Buffett, responding to a question asking how one might combat feelings of negativity or discontent with statistics, reminded the student asking the question of her relative privilege: “There are 7 billion people in the world and everyone has their own ticket…Would you want to give up your ticket and pick another from a hundred? If you don’t want to play that game, you’re saying you’re among the luckiest 1% of humanity.”
- It’s better to be a small fish in a big pond, than a big fish in a little pond. Imagine where humanity would be sans environmental features forcing its evolutionary track? Put simply, to get better, we need to be challenged. Buffett, writes Ng, could be heard “telling students to surround themselves with people better than they are.”
- Become the employee you want to be. In the same way that we should dress not for the job we have, but the job we want, new job-seekers should strive to be their own ideal of what an employee should be, said Buffett, telling students they should “be the kinds of employees they would want to hire.”
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