One Powerful Success Secret I Learned from Warren Buffett [Hint: It’s Not about Investing] by Vishal Khandelwal, Safal Niveshak
When I tell people how I manage my entire business on my own – from website management, to reading, writing, sending mailers, to organizing workshops and also booking a lot of travel tickets – a lot of them are in disbelief.
They disbelieve me even more when I tell them that I work for just 3-4 hours a day and take a lot of family holidays.
Well, I do not have any Masters degree in time management, but one thing that has really helped me manage my time well is a simple secret I’ve learned from people like Ben Franklin and Warren Buffett.
That simple secret is that of…
Daily Rituals
There are but 24 hours in a day! And when you have a seemingly overwhelming amount of work, it can be a quite a challenge to even know where to start.
But remember that history’s most legendary figures – from Ben Franklin to Warren Buffett – had just as little (or just as much) time as you have.
One of the biggest reasons I believe these men made it to the history books is because they never took giant steps to make it to the history books.
Instead, all they focused on was to do their daily rituals with complete integrity…and that seemingly made the difference.
Like, take a look at this ideal daily routine of Benjamin Franklin that he shared in his autobiography…
Every morning Franklin asked himself, “What good shall I do today?” Then, every night, he asked, “What good did I do today?”
Of course, Franklin’s schedule misses some things from modern life – like exercise, cooking, family and friends, trips to the grocery store, etc. But how else can you define simply how you would like to spend each of your days?
In a commencement address he gave at Stanford back in 2005, Steve Jobs revealed the motivational tactic he used to set the tone for the rest of his day…
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
That’s pretty powerful stuff to define what you would like to do daily!
Now consider what Warren Buffett does daily. When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”
Daily Rituals and the Power of Compounding
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken,” says Warren Buffett.
Habits play a very important role in the building of successful lives. Like the habit of reading daily proved in case of Warren Buffett.
We are all creatures of habit. As the French gastronome (a lover of good food) Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell what you are.” But habits build over time. And the benefits of good habits compound over a period of time.
But for this compounding to take place, the idea of working on the habit daily is what is required.
In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Now, while ten thousand hours look like a lot of time, if you can work on a habit – like reading books or learning value investing – diligently for just 2 hours daily, you’ll reach mastery in less than 14 years.
For me, personally, if I can work on my business diligently for just four hours a day, which I have been doing for almost four years now, I can achieve something credible in seven years (so just three years remain!).
We Are What We Repeatedly Do
Napoleon Hill wrote this in his landmark book titled Think and Grow Rich…
Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.
On the inverse, here is what the French writer Ernest Dimnet said…
The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
So, repetition works both in the creative and destructive process. Mahatma Gandhi was a product of creative daily habits, Hitler of destructive.
Even when it comes to learning the art of investing, there’s not one book or course that can teach you to become a sensible investor, and in a few weeks or months.
Reading books and making notes is just a part of the habit building process, and I’m sure Gladwell’s ten thousand hours framework also applies here. On the contrary, people who regularly spend a lot of time watching business television, reading newspapers, discussing on stock forums, and looking at online stock portfolios, are just building the wrong habits…again through daily repetition.
So, if you want to diligently learn how to become sensible in your investment decision making – especially learning how to pick stocks on your own – you better start learning how to manage your behaviour and analyze businesses effectively.
And to do that, reading a few pages of annual reports daily and few pages of the best books on investing and human behaviour daily can go a long way.
Repetition – practicing daily rituals, daily – is the price you would have to pay to be great at something…and investing follows the same process.
This is one big non-investing lesson I’ve learned from Warren Buffett.
How Warren Buffett Does It
Now, while even Buffett is granted a 24-hour day, based on my reading of his life and experience, I believe here’s how he takes out time to practice his daily rituals of reading 500 pages and other important things that matter to him…
- Says ‘no’ a lot of things – Buffett avoids businesses he doesn’t understand and as per him, these are much more in number than ones he understand.
- Remains anti-social – Buffett doesn’t use Facebook, Twitter, and probably even emails. He’s largely disconnected from the online world, and thus must give him ample amount of time to use productively.
- Loves inactivity – Buffett doesn’t go out there every day to find the next biggest 10 or 100-baggers. He doesn’t have to. Sometimes he can find but often times he don’t. There are usually 3-4 purchases in a year. It’s a laid back approach to investing. Remember the Blaise Pascal principle of sitting quietly in a room.
- Spends time only with people he likes – Warren Buffett’s inner circle is quite small. He generally avoids people he doesn’t like, which makes his life easier and his working relationships better. If you are a on a job, this is almost impossible to do. But still try to do this and I’m sure you’ll create a lot of time to do things that really matter.
- Does what he loves – You often find time for things you love doing. This is also true of learning how to invest. Reading books and annual reports may look boring to people who look at these as outsiders, but there’s an unbelievable amount of romance in these black and white pages if you love to go through them daily.
I’m not sure if Warren Buffett has read any of those productivity books out there. But it seems that his practice of simplicity, avoidance of things that take a toll on his time and energy, and focusing on practicing the most important things daily has been the root causes behind his immense success.
If all this worked for him, why can’t it work for us? Don’t you think?
Seize the Day!
Remember this – What you do daily, day after day, has great powers in altering the course of your life ahead – both positively and negatively. I can personally vouch for this.
So, choose what you do daily very carefully…and then do it daily.
And finally remember what Steve Jobs said in his famous speech at Stanford…
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Your – and my – time is really very limited. How we decide to spend our days will ultimately decide how we would end up spending the rest of our lives.
P.S. How I Spend My Days
Though you may not be interested, but let me still share what I do on a normal day that has helped me immensely over the past few years (ever since I quit my job and took control over my time).
I normally get up at 6 AM, and get my kids ready who leave for school at 7.30. I then go for a 30-45 minute walk/run. After finishing that, I get ready (to go nowhere!) by around 9.30. I then work – which mostly consists of writing articles like this one – for around 2 hours – till around 12 PM.
The next 2 hours – till around 2 PM – are spent reading books and/or annual reports and making notes for future articles. Then, after having my lunch, I spend some time with my family till around 4 PM.
I spend the next 1-2 hours in either writing more stuff or working on other aspects of my business – website, mailers, workshops, travel, etc. My time post 6 PM is for myself and my family again. I mostly have my dinner at 7 PM and go to sleep at 10.
Now, while my life is not perfectly systematic as the above note may make you believe, I manage to stick to this schedule most of the times…and especially to my morning work ritual that set the pace for the rest of my day.
Sticking to my daily rituals has what has helped me channelize my energy well into my business of writing and investing over these past few years. I’m sure it will benefit you too.
After all, no matter what’s happening in your life, coping and succeeding are both a matter of routine.
Further Reading – If you wish to learn how the world’s most creative minds from history used to spend their days, you must read this brilliant book called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, written by Mason Currey. It contains accounts of Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Jane Austen, Beethoven, Karl Marx, Picasso, and many more.
