Fiduciary Duty

I’ll be the ten thousandth person to write a little note about the Berkshire meeting that happened over the weekend.

Among the million things that “made the dusty” for me was this part of the Q&A portion:

Question: “Hello, my name is Dennis from Griffon, Germany. This is my first time here. I’m here with my friend who would, by the way, love to invite you to dinner. You talked about the importance of heroes, and we are very happy and thankful that we have you as our hero with great values. Thank you for that. First of all, my question is, it is clear that you achieved great success in life. Earlier you talked about every investment having opportunity cost. From what I’ve learned in life, that does not only apply to investing your money, but also to investing your time? Every hour you spend in your office is an hour you cannot spend with your spouse or children. With the life experience you have now, if you had the possibility to start all over again, would you set your priorities any different? If yes, how and why? And what’s the best way to invite you to dinner?”

Warren: “That definitely won’t be one of my priorities if I figure out how to do that. But don’t take it personally, because you can figure out at the maximum longest period I’ve got. I can figure out all kinds of things that should have been done differently, but so what? You know, I mean, I’m not perfect. I don’t believe in lots of self criticism or being unrealistic about either what you are or what you’ve accomplished or what you’d like to do. You do the, you know, you do a lot of things, and who knows whether, some with different trade offs. You know, you just can’t, you can’t. You don’t know where the paths would have led. I feel, I don’t think there’s any room in beating up yourself over what’s happened in the past. It’s happened and you get to live the rest of the life and you don’t know how long it’s going to be. And you keep trying to do the things that are important to you. If I was a doctor or if I was all kinds of different professions, I might do different things, but I really enjoy managing money for people who trust me. I don’t have any reason to do it for financial reasons. I’m not running a hedge fund or getting an override or anything. I just like the feeling of being trusted. Charlie felt the same way. That’s a good way to feel in life and it continues to be a good feeling. So I’m not really looking to change much. And, you know, if I’m very lucky, I get to play it off for six or seven years and it could end tomorrow. But that’s, that’s true of everybody, although the equation isn’t exactly the same. But I don’t believe in beating yourself up over anything you’ve done in the past. And I don’t believe in, well, I believe in trying to find what you’re good at, what you enjoy. And then I think the one thing that you can aspire to be, because this can be done by anybody, and it’s amazing, and it doesn’t have anything to do with money. But you can be kind. You can be kind. If you’re (kind), and then the world’s better off.”

Long live the Oracle of Omaha.

That’s all for now,

Tyler