巴菲特的新书---《The Snowball》

The Buffetts in 1937 (l-r): sister Bertie, Warren, mother Leila, and sister Doris.

The first few cents Warren Buffett earned came from selling chewing gum. And from the day he started selling--at 6 years of age--he showed an unyielding attitude toward his customers that revealed his later style. "I remember a woman saying, 'I'll take one stick of Juicy Fruit,'" he says. "I said, 'We don't break up packs of gum'--I mean, I've got my principles." Making a sale was tempting, but not tempting enough. If he sold one stick to her, he'd have four sticks left to sell, not worth the work or the risk. He made two cents profit per pack.

Warren switched to selling Coca-Cola--he made a nickel for every six bottles--and copies of the Saturday Evening Post and Liberty magazines. By the time he was 9 or 10, he and a pal were selling used golf balls until the cops stopped them. When the police talked to his parents, Howard and Leila weren't concerned. They just considered their son ambitious.

For Warren's 10th birthday, Howard took him to New York. A scene from the stock exchange dining room captured his imagination."We had lunch with At Mol, a member of the stock exchange. After lunch, a guy came along with a tray that had all these different kinds of tobacco leaves on it. He made up a cigar for Mr. Mol, who picked out the leaves that he wanted. I thought: It doesn't get any better than this." Warren had zero interest in smoking a cigar, but he saw what hiring a man for such a frivolous purpose implied. It meant that, even while most of the country was still mired in the Depression, the cigar man's employer--the stock exchange--was making a great deal of money. That day, a vision of his future was planted. 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."

One day at the library, a book beckoned from the shelves. One Thousand Ways To Make $1000 it was called. This book explained the concept of compound interest. Warren started thinking: If he made $1000, as the book said, and it grew at a yearly rate of 10% interest, in 5 years, $1000 would become more than $1600; in 10 years, it would become almost $2600; and in 25 years, it would become more than $10,800. He could picture the numbers compounding as vividly as the way a snowball grew when he rolled it across the lawn.

Warren announced that he would be a millionaire by age 35, an audacious statement for an 11-year-old to make in the depressed world of 1941. By the spring of 1942, his hoard totaled $120. With sister Doris as a partner, he invested in three shares of a company called Cities Service Preferred. The market hit a low that June, and the stock plunged. Warren says he felt terribly responsible. So when the stock recovered, he sold, netting a $5 profit. But Cities Service quickly soared from $40 to $202 a share.

Warren learned three lessons and would call this episode one of the most important of his life. One lesson was not to overly fixate on what he had paid for a stock. The second was not to rush unthinkingly to grab a small profit. He learned these two lessons by brooding over the $492 he'd have made had he been patient. It had taken five years of work, since he was 6, to save $120 to buy the stock. And there was a third lesson, about investing other people's money. If he made a mistake, it might get somebody upset at him. So he didn't want to have responsibility for anyone else's money unless he was sure he could succeed.

Adapted from "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder, to be published this month by Bantam Books.