Warren Buffett’s Advice on Investing and Careers

Warren Buffett has dropped a lot of advice gems throughout his 55 years at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett said Saturday that he’d be stepping down as CEO by the end of 2025. And in addition to his legacy with the company, he’s also left behind countless nuggets of wisdom for anyone from high-powered leaders to those working their way up the corporate ladder.

The 94-year-old spent about 70 years teaching investment classes, and his mentorship has expanded over time to include life lessons. Buffett has previously said that he gets something out of sharing knowledge, too.

“Teaching, like writing, has helped me develop and clarify my own thoughts,” Buffett said in a 2020 address to graduates of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Here are some of Buffet’s best nuggets of wisdom.

Quality of life advice

1. “I would focus on the things that have been good in your life rather than the bad things that happen, because bad things do happen,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual meeting Saturday, Morningstar reported. “It can often be a wonderful life even with some bad breaks.”
2. “Hugely wealthy parents should leave their children enough so they can do anything but not enough that they can do nothing,” Buffett wrote in a letter to shareholders in 2024.
3. A famous quote that’s often attributed to Buffett is, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
4. “Don’t confuse the cost of living with the standard of living,” Buffett told Alice Schroeder in “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.”
5. “If I get tough on myself about philanthropy, I remember what Warren Buffett said to us originally, which is, ‘You’re working on the problems society left behind, and they left them behind for a reason. They are hard, right? So don’t be so tough on yourself,'” longtime friend Melinda French Gates wrote in a memoir.

Career advice

1. “I have urged that they seek employment in (1) the field and (2) with the kind of people they would select, if they had no need for money,” Buffett wrote in a 2023 letter to shareholders, referring to his talks to university students.

   “Economic realities, I acknowledge, may interfere with that kind of search,” he said. “Even so, I urge the students never to give up the quest, for when they find that sort of job, they will no longer be ‘working.'”

2. “Who you associate with is just enormously important,” he reportedly said at the Saturday meeting. “Don’t expect you’ll make every decision right on that. You’re going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends.”
3. “You want to look for the job in life that you would take if you didn’t need a job. Don’t settle for anything, eventually, that’s less than working for a company you admire or people you admire — the job that if you had no need for the money, it’s still the job that you’d jump out of bed for in the morning,” he said during a 2020 interview.

Business and investment advice

1. “A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful,” he said in a 2008 op-ed for The New York Times.
2. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get,” Buffett wrote in a 2008 shareholder letter.
3. “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing,” he wrote in “The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America” in 2015.
4. “People have emotions,” he said at Berkshire’s annual meeting over the weekend, “but you’ve got to check them at the door when you invest.”