Warren Buffett on Choosing the Right Heroes in Life | Berkshire 2024

[Transcript]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Jeff Roblyer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I’m thinking of Doctor Graham, Mr. Munger, your father. And my question is, for all of us, but it’s probably especially for the younger people in the room, the importance of picking the right heroes in life. Choosing friends wisely, and maybe tell us, a story, if you could, about each of those folks. Thank you, sir.

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, there’s no question you’re 100% right in terms of having the right heroes. And, you know, you’re lucky if you get them. I mean, Charlie had them, I had them. And the interesting thing, my sister is here today, my younger sister, we're the two survivors. And we both experienced having the same hero, even though as we grew older, we saw that we didn’t agree with plenty of his ideas, but we did agree with his values and motivation.

And that's, that’s a better lesson than having somebody that reading to you from a catechism, that has got a lot of rules in it, which are pretty good rules, but there’s a special, special place for somebody that is going to continue loving you even if you break some of the rules. And that’s what Charlie had in his life, was what Bertie and I had in our life.

So I would just repeat what you said. I don’t need to give you a bunch of — Well, when I ran away from home, I’ll give you a specific example with me. When I ran away from home and went and we hitchhiked up to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and got picked up by the state police and everything. And I talked these other two guys into it and we lied like crazy to the state police, you know, saying we had our parents' permission.

Some kid at the place where we stayed had tipped them off that we’d run away from home. And we started, like I said, state police picked us up. We decided two things. You know, we decided to tell them a bunch of lies about the fact we had our parents' permission. And we decided we better get out of Hershey because these cops were going to find out sooner or later.

And so anyway, we end up back in Washington after a couple days. And when I walked in the door, well, one of the boy’s mother and this other kid was the congressman, Roger Bell. And his mother was in the hospital over this whole thing. He’d taken out his cash and his savings bonds. And so she was sick. And Judge Bell, her husband, was all concerned and everything.

And I walked in the door in Washington and my mother said, "How come he came back so soon?" And my father said, he said, "I know you can do better." And I just paid more attention to my father than my mother. So you want to have the right heroes and you don’t have to have them. It’s not the heroes based on what they’ve accomplished.

And it's, you know, It’s the people that you want to be yourself. And if you copy the right people, you’re off to a great start. And I don’t mean great start about making money. I mean a great start about living your life.

So you can check with my sister Bertie who’s here, and see if I’ve told the story correctly. She ran away from home, too, incidentally, but she didn’t get as far as I got. (Laughter) She was running away to go over to my grandfather’s house, which was about 2 miles away. (Laughter)

But I don’t want to denigrate her runaway abilities because she was much more accomplished than I am in all kinds of other things. But when it comes to running away, I definitely outclassed her. (Laughs)

Source: https://buffett.cnbc.com/2024-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting/

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