Transcription
Well, no doubt many of you are wondering why the speaker is so old. Well, the answer is obvious. He hasn't died yet. And why was the speaker chosen? Well, I don't know that either. I like to think that the development department had nothing to do with it.
Whatever the reason, I think it's very fitting that I'm sitting here because I see one crowd of faces in the rear not wearing robes. And I know from having educated an army of descendants who really deserves a lot of the honors that are being given to the people up here in front. The sacrifice and the wisdom and the value transfer that comes from one generation to the next can never be underrated. And that gave me enormous pleasure as I looked at this sea of Asian faces to my left. All my life I've admired Confucious. I like the idea of felial piety. the idea that there are values that are taught and duties that come naturally and that all that should be passed on to the next generation. And you people who don't think there's anything in this idea, please note how fast these Asian faces are rising in American life. I think they have something.
All right. the I scratched out a few notes and I'm going to try and just give an account of some ideas and attitudes that have worked well for me. I don't claim that they're perfect for everybody, although I think many of them are pretty close to universal values and many of them are are can't fail ideas. What are the core ideas that have helped me? Well, luckily I got at a very early age the idea that the safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want. It's such a simple idea. That's the golden rule so to speak. You you want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos in my opinion that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who had this ethos uh win in life and they don't win just money just honors and imalments. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with. And there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust. And so, and the way to get it is to deliver what you'd want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.
Occasionally you find a perfect rogue of a person who dies rich and with uh and widely known. But mostly these people are fully understood by the surrounding civilization. And when the cathedral is full of people at the funeral ceremony, most of them are are there to celebrate the fact that the person is dead. And uh that reminds me of the story of the time when one of these people died and the minister said, "It's now time for someone to say something nice about the deceased." And nobody came forward. And nobody came forward. And nobody came forward. And finally one man came up and he said, "Well, his brother was worse." That is not where you want to go. That's not the kind of funeral you want to have. You'll leave entirely the wrong example.
A second idea that I got very early was that there's no love that's so right as admirationbased love. And that love should include the instructive dead. Somehow I got that idea and I've lived with it all my life and it's been very very useful to me. A love like that celebrated by Somerset mom in uh his book of human bondage. That's a sick kind of love. It's a disease. And if you find yourself in a disease like that, my advice to you is turn around and fix it. Eliminate it. Uh, another idea that I got and this may remind you of Confucious too is that wisdom acquisition was a moral duty. It's not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty and and there's a correlary to that proposition which is very important. It means that you're hooked for lifetime learning. And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You're going to advance in life by what you're going to learn after you leave here.
If you take Berkshire Hathaway, which is certainly one of the best regarded corporations in the world and it may have the best invest long-term investment record in the entire history of civilization, the skill that got Berkshire through one decade would not have sufficed to get it through the next decade with the uh achievements made without Warren Buffett. being a learning machine, continuous learning machine, the record would have been absolutely impossible. The same is true at lower walks of life. I constantly see people rise in life who were not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up. And boy does that habit help particularly when you have a long uh run ahead of you. Alfred North Whitehead said at one time that the rapid advance of civilization came only when man invented the method of invention. And of course he was referring to the huge growth in GB GDP per capita and all the other good things that we now take for granted which happened just started a few hundred years ago and when before that all was stasis and uh so if if if civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention You can progress only when you learn the method of learning. I was very lucky. I came to law school having learned the method of learning and uh and nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning. And if you take Warren Buffett, if you watched him with a time clock, I would say half of all the time that he spends is just sitting on his ass and reading. And a big chunk of the rest of the time is spent talking one-on-one either on the telephone or personally with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who trust him. In other words, it looks quite academic. All this worldly success, academia has many wonderful values in it.
I came across such a value not too long ago. That was several years ago when my capacity as a hospital board chairman I was dealing with a medical school academic and this man over years of hard work had made himself know more about bone tumor pathology than almost anybody else in the world and he wanted to pass this knowledge on to the rest of us and and particularly the people that treat cancer, bone cancer. And how was he going to do it? Well, he decided to write a textbook that would be very useful to other people. Now, I don't think a textbook like this sells 2,000 copies, but those 2,000 copies are in all the major cancer centers of the world. He took a year's sabbatica and he sat down at his computer and he had all the slides because he'd saved them and organized them and filed them. He worked 17 hours a day, seven days a week for a year. That was his sbatical. At the end of the year, he had one of the great bone tumor pathology textbooks of the world. When you're around values like that, you want to pick up as much as you can.
The other another idea that was hugely useful to me was that I listened in law school when some wag said, "A legal mind is a mind that when two things are all twisted up together and interacting, it's feasible to think responsibly about one thing and not the other." Well, I could see from that one sentence that that was perfectly ridiculous and it pushed me further into my natural drift, which was into learning all the big ideas and all the big disciplines. So, I wouldn't be a perfect damn fool who was trying to think about one aspect of something that couldn't be removed from the totality of the situation in a constructive fashion. And what I noted, since the really big ideas carry 95% of the freight, that it wasn't at all hard for me to pick up all the big ideas in all the disciplines and make them a standard part of my mental routines. Once you have the ideas, of course, they're no good if you don't practice. If you don't practice, you lose it. So I went through life constantly practicing this multidisciplinary approach. Well, I can't tell you what that's done for me. It's it's it's made life more fun. It's made me more constructive. It's made me more helpful to others. It's made me enormously rich. You name it. That attitude really helps.
Now, there are dangers in it because it works so well that if you do it, you will frequently find you're sitting in the presence of some other expert, maybe even an expert that's superior to you, supervising you, and you will know more than he does about his own specialty. A lot more. You'll see the correct answer when he's missed it. That is a very dangerous position to be in. You can cause enormous offense by helpfully being right in a way that causes somebody else to lose face. And uh I never found a perfect way to to solve that problem. I was a great poker player when I was young, but I wasn't a good enough poker player. So the people failed to sense that I thought I knew more than they did about their subjects.