My Best Resource on Warren Buffett and His Path to Success

The best way to become like the rich successful people we admire is not by paying all our attention to what they did after they have become rich but to pay the most attention to what they did before they became rich. If you are going to imitate a billionaire you are better off imitating his rise to riches than trying to match his billionaire lifestyle.

And that has been my strategy. All the people I admire and would love to be like I read more about their lives, starting up, and how they went from oblivion and, sometimes, penury to relevance and abundance. I know almost everything publicly available on Andrew Carnegie, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. I have all the popular books on them, especially their biographies. And one of the valuable things I have seen common to them all is that they had developed the mindset and habits that helped they grow and sustain their wealth/success long before they became wealthy/successful. Most of the useful lessons one could learn from their lives are in how they walked their way to success and not in our they lived after becoming successful.

image: rationalwalk.com

Today, I will be sharing with you one of the very valuable resources I have on Warren Buffett. It tracked his life from age 28 to 39 and were all written by Warren Buffett himself. You will get to learn a lot about him, his habits and his philosophy from this resource I'll be sharing with you. It is a compilation of his letters to his business partners from the year 1958 to 1969. He started Buffett Partnership Limited that later morphed into Berkshire Hathaway at the age of 26 in 1956. He started small and with his life savings. And reading through these letters you will have a good feel of the thinking that enabled him to become spectacularly successful. You can download the compilation of his Buffett Partnership Limited letters here. (I had gotten them individually from RBCPA).

One of the very specific lessons I got from reading them is that a lasting success is best built slowly. That as long as you are growing and not greedy you will achieve the success you seek. Another is that doing what you believe is right pays off in the long run than doing what you see everyone else doing. A third one is that you can never start too small. Even if other people look down on you and your business it is got going to hurt your success or limit it. Just make sure you don't look down on yourself and your business.