Budding Buffetts and The Best of All Worlds

seventeen year old from San Francisco, attending his “tenth consecutive meeting,” wants to know:

“What should I do to become a great investor?”

Buffett’s emphatic answer reminds me of “The Graduate,” when Mr. McGuire famously tells Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin, that one word—“Plastics”—as if it is the key to the universe.

Buffett says:

“Read everything you can.”

It is advice Buffett will give in different ways throughout the morning and afternoon.

For Buffett strongly believes—and Munger later concurs—it was the reading he did in his formative years that shaped his approach to investing and prepared the groundwork for the next fifty mind-bogglingly successful years.

And he’s not kidding when he says to “read everything you can”:

“When I was ten,” he says, “I’d already read every book in the Omaha Public Library with the word ‘finance’ in the title.”

Buffett does not advise reading any particular books, nor does he steer the budding Buffetts towards any particular investment style, even though the impact of Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor” on Buffett is widely known.

Rather, he advises reading everything possible to find the style that suits the individual:

“If it turns you on, it probably will work for you.”