Warren Buffet on life and old age
Warren Buffet's letters to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders are always a delight to read, and examples of excellent writing and compelling storytelling. His most recent one, published a couple of days ago, is no exception.
You should read the entire letter, but a couple of paragraphs stood out to me (having recently turned forty and all):
One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: 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.
I aspire to the same. No, not the founding a multi-billion business part, but the feeling better about the second half of my life than the first.
Then there's this, on his children (emphasis mine):
My children are all above normal retirement age, having reached 72, 70 and 67. It would be a mistake to wager that all three – now at their peak in many respects – will enjoy my exceptional luck in delayed aging. To improve the probability that they will dispose of what will essentially be my entire estate before alternate trustees replace them, I need to step up the pace of lifetime gifts to their three foundations. My children are now at their prime in respect to experience and wisdom but have yet to enter old age. That “honeymoon” period will not last forever.
The idea that you hit your prime in some ways in your late sixties and early seventies is so foreign, so far from what I've always thought, yet utterly compelling. What's more, when it's Warren Buffet saying it, I suddenly find myself agreeing.
"Of course, when he puts it like that, it's true, isn't it?"
Reading this letter today made me cheerful an optimistic. And excited about the decades to comes, as I'll continue to make mistakes — and learn from them — while working myself up to my prime in respect to experience and wisdom.