Disciple of Wealth: An Unexpected Journey
Photo by Vladimir Solomianyi on Unsplash
I was a nontraditional college student, and I was going to be rich. And I was going to learn from the best how to get there. In my teens, I’d learned the magic of compounding returns. I moved on to Peter Lynch’s “Beat The Street”. And I found the Super-Investors of Graham And Doddsville, and I was hooked. I read Ben Graham. I printed out 10-K SEC filings and pored over them, calculating free-cash-flow ratios. And I bought a couple of “baby” shares in Graham’s most famous disciple’s company, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. (Turns out, financially, I should have stopped right there…but anyway.) I wasn’t sure whether I’d manage a fund or private wealth, but I was going to hone my skills, and use them to make other people rich, and become independently wealthy myself.
The Berkshire shareholder meeting has been called “The Capitalist Woodstock”, and one B-share would get you in to hear the Oracle’s wisdom live. And so, I made the pilgrimage to Omaha. Like a huge fair, you could load up on products from Berkshire companies. Mrs. See’s. Justin Boots. A custom Berkshire Monopoly game. Swarovski crystal from Borsheim’s. And books, my favorite. Recommendations from the masters themselves, Buffett and Charlie Munger. And a lovely coffee-table book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, written by a fan of Munger to capture his “worldly wisdom”. That was a dangerous book.
Munger really was a wise person, with deep insights. His approach to mental models changed my intellectual life. (For a worthy current promoter of these ideas, see Shane Parrish at Farnam Street.) And the practical wisdom captured in his speeches and aphorisms is worth reading and re-reading.
But one little nugget in the Almanack stuck in my mind. It wasn’t lengthy and apparently isn’t famous, because I’m having difficulty finding it either in the physical pages or online right now; citation, hopefully, to be added. But it was a seed that began to grow.
Munger was a billionaire. But he lamented how much we reward intelligence in finance, and how much society loses when brilliant minds devote themselves to “shuffling little pieces of paper” (I wish I had the exact quote for you, but for now you’ll have to rely on recollections from a couple of decades ago) instead of working on the real problems confronting us.
It gave me a bit of pause, but I read on. Later, I finished a couple of business degrees and a postgraduate finance designation. But Munger’s lesson kept on simmering. It combined with other destabilizers over time…but those factors, and the ways they’ve combined, are other stories. Stories along the path to becoming a lot less focused on maximizing my net worth, but even more interested in understanding what kinds of “wealth” we hold, build, and destroy in our collective interactions.
I’ve come to a complicated relationship with capital and with business. Misuse of money can be a social cancer, and the structures of modern capitalism celebrate such misuses. But I still believe good people can build good businesses that build up their communities, even amidst a broken system–and I’ve spent several decades acquiring the tools to help them do so.
If you’re a business owner fighting to build something meaningful and profitable, I’d like to get to know you and cheer you on as an ally in the struggle. Or if you want to work with me, I’m glad to do that too.
Through Common Thriving, I help business owners move from chaos and uncertainty in their businesses to clarity and confidence about specific steps toward a future they really want. I also offer implementation help, so that paralysis and confusion can change to forward momentum and understanding, and to thriving individuals, companies, and communities. If these are challenges you’d like to progress on, book a time on my calendar to explore what might be possible–I’ll enjoy talking with you!