5 things Warren Buffett does after work
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When the Oracle of Omaha talks, people make pilgrimages. In fact, thousands of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders flock to the tiny town of Omaha, Nebraska each year to hear him talk about investing.
Of course, if any business leader can command that level of devotion, it’s Mr. Buffett.
He has practically doubled or tripled his net worth in every decade of his life, and is now worth $67 billion.
A single share of his company’s stock? Try $191,396. That's enough to buy a house in any one of the 50 states.
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Teach us your ways, Warren!
There are countless books on how Buffett accumulated his wealth (Amazon has almost 20 pages of results under his name). The number of articles about him on sites like The Motley Fool, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider is probably somewhere in the thousands.
But there aren’t that many articles on what he does in his spare time after work.
This isn’t surprising. In our current culture of competitive workaholics who regularly work late hours, Buffett’s office schedule is more valuable to readers than his home hobbies. But his famous zen attitude towards managing, investing and making billions can be largely attributed to his enviable work-life balance.
Here are 5 things Warren Buffett does each day that we could all learn from:
Mario Tama / Getty Images1. Read 500 pages.
Once, when asked how to get smarter, the Oracle held up a stack of papers and said, "read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest."
Buffett estimates that he spends 80% of his waking day reading at work (financial statements, journals, reports) and at home (newspapers and books). Some of us don’t read that many pages each year.
"I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business." Makes sense; the better read you are, the more informed you are, the less impulsive you are.
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2. Exercise a little.
Buffett once said that his secret to staying young is to "eat like a six-year-old." This includes drinking up to five Cokes a day. "I’m one-quarter Coca-Cola," he admitted. (Considering he owns $16 billion in Coca-Cola stock, that’s not too far from the truth.) Keep in mind that the 85-year-old also likes to eat hamburgers, steaks, hash browns, and root beer floats.
In 2007 (at the age of 77), he revealed that his doctor had given him a simple choice: "Either you eat better or you exercise." Buffett chose exercise, "the lesser of two evils." The simple life change must have worked. After beating prostate cancer in 2015, he still looks happy and healthy.
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3. Be grateful, not wasteful.
Following in the footsteps of his hero, Chuck Feeney (who secretly gave away his entire fortune), Buffett is one of the world’s biggest philanthropists. His Giving Pledge also boasts dozens of billionaire signees, including Bill Gates, who have committed half their net worth to charitable causes. Buffett has pledged to give away 99% of his fortune during his lifetime.
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"If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%."
He is also famously frugal, so it all works out. Not only does Mr. Buffett live in the same house he bought in 1958 for $31,500 (ironically, it costs significantly more to live next to him). He also likes to treat investors who visit him in Omaha to McDonald’s for lunch.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider