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21 Lessons From Warren Buffett

David Senra of Founders Podcast recently shared a summary list of lessons from Warren Buffett which I found valuable:

  1. Big opportunities come infrequently. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.
  2. A funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.
  3. The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph.
  4. Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me.
  5. When a problem exists, whether in personnel or in business operations, the time to act is now.
  6. The roads of business are riddled with potholes; a plan that requires dodging them all is a plan for disaster.
  7. A compact organization lets all of us spend our time managing the business rather than managing each other.
  8. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.
  9. The most elusive of human goals: Keeping things simple and remembering what you set out to do.
  10. Just run your business as if:
    • (1) You own 100% of it;
    • (2) It is the only asset in the world that you and your family have or will ever have; and
    • (3) You can’t sell it for at least a century.
  11. The right players will make almost any team manager look good.
  12. Just tell me the bad news; the good news will take care of itself.
  13. Our managers have produced extraordinary results by doing rather ordinary things—but doing them exceptionally well.
  14. It’s difficult to teach a new dog old tricks.
  15. On a daily basis, the effects of our actions are imperceptible; cumulatively, though, their consequences are enormous.
  16. Charlie and I are not big fans of resumes. Instead, we focus on brains, passion and integrity.
  17. Our experience has been that the manager of an already high-cost operation frequently is uncommonly resourceful in finding new ways to add to overhead while the manager of a tightly-run operation usually continues to find additional methods to curtail costs, even when his costs are already well below those of his competitors.
  18. Tomorrow is always uncertain.
  19. The trick is to learn most lessons from the experiences of others.
  20. In allocating capital, activity does not correlate with achievement.
  21. The less the prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater the prudence with which we should conduct our own affairs.

Here’s the original tweet from David Senra:

If you liked this post, you will also like Warren Buffett: “We Need Inspirational Leaders” and Warren Buffett’s Greatest Error.

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