Alice Schroeder > Quotes

“On me personally what has been the most important was to understand the value of time -- and this is something that has come from observing him, learning his story and that time compounds. What you do when you are young (and as you use time over your life) can have an exponential effect so that if you are thoughtful about it, you can really have powerful results later, if you want to.

Also, that is a reason to be hopeful, because compounding is something that happens pretty quickly. If you are 50 or 60, it is not too late. He said to me one time, if there is something you really want to do, don't put it off until you are 70 years old. ... Do it now. Don't worry about how much it costs or things like that, because you are going to enjoy it now. You don't even know what your health will be like then.

On the other hand, if you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period. And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years. That lesson is something I use all the time now.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“Everybody wants attention and admiration. Nobody wants to be criticized. The sweetest sound in the English language is the sound of a person’s own name. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly. Let the other person save face.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“Intensity is the price of excellence.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“He has a really consistent routine. He comes in in the morning at around 8:30. He reads five newspapers. He reads The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Omaha World Herald. Then he has a stack of reports on his desk from the companies Berkshire owns, and some trade press like American Banker or oil and gas journals, and through the rest of the day, he alternates between flipping through this stuff and then talking on the phone to people either who call him or who he calls. He never calls his managers; they can call him. He is really accessible, but he leaves them alone.

Then he has CNBC on all day long with the crawl, with the sound muted and if he sees his name cross along the bottom and they are talking about him, he will turn the sound on to find out what they are saying. That is his day. He doesn't do meetings -- there are no meetings.
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― Alice Schroeder

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” This was the time to be greedy.33”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don't care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

That's the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love it that you can't buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love. But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get."

— Warren Buffett”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“Stocks are the things to own over time. Productivity will increase and stocks will increase with it. There are only a few things you can do wrong. One is to buy or sell at the wrong time. Paying high fees is the other way to get killed. The best way to avoid both of these is to buy a low-cost index fund, and buy it over time. Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy, but don’t think you can outsmart the market. “If a cross-section of American industry is going to do well over time, then why try to pick the little beauties and think you can do better? Very few people should be active investors.”
― Schroeder, Alice, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“Who’s my most valuable client?’ And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“He added one catch: She must sign a noncompete agreement, a contract designed so that she could never again compete with him. This was something he wished he’d done before. The absurdity of imposing a noncompete agreement on a ninety-nine-year-old woman was far from lost on him. Nevertheless, Buffett was taking no chances.”
― Schroeder, Alice, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“He flaunted obnoxious feats of memory by quoting page numbers and passages back in class and correcting his teachers on their text citations.14 “You forgot the comma,” he said to one.15”
― Schroeder, Alice, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“As Buffett liked to put it, “Intensity is the price of excellence.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“You should never, when facing some unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase into two or three through your failure of will,” he would later say.14”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“he worked with a passion for the future he saw ahead of him, right there in sight. He wanted money. “It could make me independent. Then I could do what I wanted to do with my life. And the biggest thing I wanted to do was work for myself. I didn’t want other people directing me. The idea of doing what I wanted to do every day was important to me.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“I feel like I’m on my back, and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away. I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“The Keoughs were wonderful neighbors,” he said. “It’s true that occasionally Don would mention that, unlike me, he had a job, but the relationship was terrific. One time my wife, Susie, went over and did the proverbial Midwestern bit of asking to borrow a cup of sugar, and Don’s wife, Mickie, gave her a whole sack. When I heard about that, I decided to go over to the Keoughs’ that night myself. I said to Don, ‘Why don’t you give me twenty-five thousand dollars for the partnership to invest?’ And the Keough family stiffened a little bit at that point, and I was rejected. “I came back sometime later and asked for the ten thousand dollars Clarke referred to and got a similar result. But I wasn’t proud. So I returned at a later time and asked for five thousand dollars. And at that point, I got rejected again. “So one night, in the summer of 1962, I started heading over to the Keough house. I don’t know whether I would have dropped it to twenty-five hundred dollars or not, but by the time I got to the Keough household, the whole place was dark, silent. There wasn’t a thing to see. But I knew what was going on. I knew that Don and Mickie were hiding upstairs, so I didn’t leave. “I rang that doorbell. I knocked. Nothing happened. But Don and Mickie were upstairs, and it was pitch-black. “Too dark to read, and too early to go to sleep. And I remember that day as if it were yesterday. That was June twenty-first, 1962. “Clarke, when were you born?” “March twenty-first, 1963.” “It’s little things like that that history turns on. So you should be glad they didn’t give me the ten thousand dollars.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“gold standard,” which the United States had dropped in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday the United States might wind up like Germany in the 1920s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage—the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.1 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question. “Here’s another one. If the world couldn’t see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world’s greatest investor but in reality have the world’s worst record? Or be thought of as the world’s worst investor when you were actually the best? “In teaching your kids, I think the lesson they’re learning at a very, very early age is what their parents put the emphasis on. If all the emphasis is on what the world’s going to think about you, forgetting about how you really behave, you’ll wind up with an Outer Scorecard. Now, my dad: He was a hundred percent Inner Scorecard guy. “He was really a maverick. But he wasn’t a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. He just didn’t care what other people thought. My dad taught me how life should be lived. I’ve never seen anybody quite like him.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“I learned that it pays to hang around with people better than you are, because you will float upward a little bit. And if you hang around with people that behave worse than you, pretty soon you’ll start sliding down the pole. It just works that way.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin either by words or pictures.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“At age forty-seven, Warren had already accomplished everything he had ever imagined he could want. He was worth $72 million. He ran a company that was worth $135 million.41 His newspaper had won the two highest prizes in journalism. He was one of the most important men in Omaha and increasingly prominent at a national level. He was serving on the boards of the largest local bank, the Washington Post, and a number of other companies. He had been CEO of three companies and had bought and sold successfully more stocks than most people could name in a lifetime. Most of his original partners were now enormously rich. All he wanted was to keep on making money for the thrill of it without changing anything else about his life. He”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“allies are essential; that commitments are so sacred that by nature they should be rare; and that grandstanding rarely gets anything done.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“In essence, one who spends less than he earns is accumulating ‘claim checks’ for future use.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“The Buffetts followed the trail blazed by earlier SUVs a few miles onward from the airport to the tiny town of Ketchum, near the turnoff to the Elkhorn Pass. A few miles later, they rounded Dollar Mountain, where a green oasis appeared, nestled among the brown slopes. Here amid the lacy pines and shimmering aspens lay Sun Valley, the mountains’ most fabled resort.”
― Schroeder, Alice, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“In five years, $1,000 became more than $1,600. In ten years, it became almost $2,600. In twenty-five years, it became more than $10,800. The way that numbers exploded as they grew at a constant rate over time was how a small sum could turn into a fortune. He could picture the numbers compounding as vividly as the way a snowball grew when he rolled it across the lawn. Warren began to think about time in a different way. Compounding married the present to the future. If a dollar today was going to be worth ten some years from now, then in his mind the two were the same.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

“Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can.”
― Alice Schroeder

“He was prone to deluging his friends with mountains of clippings and reading material that he thought would interest them.”
― Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life