Warren Buffett’s “last” letter

To say that Berkshire Hathaway’s business model has been a major influence on how we’ve built Purpose Group would be a significant understatement.

Whether through reading all of their annual reports, mainly from this 965 page book, Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders, or following Warren’s journey in building the business through books like The Snowball, we’ve tried to soak up everything Warren has had to say (and of course, everything the late Charlie Munger said, most notably in his book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack).

Warren is going quiet…sort of.

A few days back, Warren put out what seems to be his “last” update, saying:

I will no longer be writing Berkshire’s annual report or talking endlessly at the annual meeting. As the British would say, I’m “going quiet.”

Sort of.

That “sort of” will take the form of his annual Thanksgiving letter, and we’re grateful that we still have those to look forward to.

You can read his letter here (at eight pages, it’s downright anemic compared to his typical reports), but we thought we’d take the liberty of sharing our thoughts on it.

Warren’s $150 billion…

A major focus of the letter is to share what he is doing with his considerable wealth.

Spoiler alert: he’s giving it all away.

He’s doing this mostly through donations to his children’s foundations, though he’s holding on to a significant amount of his “A” shares until Berkshire shareholders “develop the comfort with Greg that Charlie and I long enjoyed.” (Greg Abel is the current CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.)

At 95, he still has the goods.

Warren hasn’t lost anything in terms of his writing. He is in his typical form: telling whimsical stories, making jokes, and sharing genuinely inspiring insights and advice throughout.

And apparently, he’s still feeling well enough to go to the office FIVE DAYS A WEEK 😳

To my surprise, I generally feel good. Though I move slowly and read with increasing difficulty, I am at the office five days a week where I work with wonderful people. Occasionally, I get a useful idea or am approached with an offer we might not otherwise have received.

He’s still having fun with his letters.

Warren’s writing has always been nothing if not approachable. In his own folksy way, he tells stories of his past, sometimes to make a larger point and sometimes to simply elicit a chuckle from his readers.

For example, in this letter, he talks about having been admitted to the hospital as a young child for an emergency appendectomy at a Catholic hospital. During his three-week stay, he received a fingerprinting set from his aunt and proceeded to fingerprint each of his nun nurses.

Later in the letter, when talking about the amazing doctors and nurses that have kept him alive and well in his old age, he refers back to the fingerprinting in what comedians would call a “tag”:

I have given up fingerprinting nurses, however.

You can get away with many eccentricities at 95 . . . . . but there are limits.

Omaha

This guy loves Omaha, let me tell you.

He spends a considerable amount of time in this letter waxing poetic about the improbable number of successful leaders who have come out of the Omaha, Nebraska area (to be fair, the list is impressive).

We can all hope our loved ones speak of us the way Warren speaks of Omaha.

He ends with some generational advice.

We’ve always appreciated Warren’s approach to life and his willingness to impart advice in his letters. Here are some of the gems we pulled from this letter:

Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve.

Get the right heroes and copy them.

Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.

Bonus: Warren ‘gets it’

One thing we’ve always appreciated about Warren Buffett is his humility as well as his recognition that luck has had a significant hand in his success:

But Lady Luck is fickle and – no other term fits – wildly unfair. In many cases, our leaders and the rich have received far more than their share of luck – which, too often, the recipients prefer not to acknowledge. Dynastic inheritors have achieved lifetime financial independence the moment they emerged from the womb, while others have arrived, facing a hell-hole during their early life or, worse, disabling physical or mental infirmities that rob them of what I have taken for granted. In many heavily-populated parts of the world, I would likely have had a miserable life and my sisters would have had one even worse.

I was born in 1930 healthy, reasonably intelligent, white, male and in America. Wow! Thank you, Lady Luck. My sisters had equal intelligence and better personalities than I but faced a much different outlook.

Here’s to hoping Warren continues to write well into his second century. We could all benefit from his enduring wisdom.