GoKawiilKey Takeaways Reflecting on his career in a new interview, Warren Buffett says his father made all the difference in his life.
Buffett pointed out that he had an early edge in finance because his father was a stockbroker.
He said it was an “accident” that he was born into a family that allowed him to gain early exposure to the field of finance.
Warren Buffett, the chairman and largest shareholder of investment group Berkshire Hathaway, turned a struggling textile company into a trillion-dollar conglomerate over six decades.
Reflecting back on his career in a new interview with CNBC, Buffett pointed out that he had an early edge in finance because his father was a stockbroker. He said it was an “accident” that he was born into a family that allowed him to gain early exposure to the field of finance.
“If my father had been a plumber,” he said, “I would not have had the same advantage I had.”
Buffett said he got extremely lucky in life. “Out of eight billion people, I may be one of the 10 luckiest in the world,” he claimed in the interview.
He considers himself fortunate to be alive and healthy at the age of 95. He joked that he is “losing marbles at this point,” but added that he had the privilege of gathering marbles “for a longer time than I deserved, and that’s just a matter of luck.”
Buffett also said in the interview that he got lucky because investing is a field he is passionate about, has a natural affinity for and functions as a vehicle to accumulate wealth. Investing is a far more lucrative passion than being a “great violin player or anything else,” he said.
Buffett told CNBC earlier this year that the most “important” career advice he ever received from his father, and later passed on to his own children, came from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay, Self-Reliance. The work encourages readers to choose an occupation that fits their nature instead of one that meets parental expectations or society’s approval.
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