Your Purpose Isn't Found, It's Accrued
What the Sage of Omaha Can Teach Us About Our Life's Work
From a young age, money was his game.
With a single-minded devotion not uncommon to kids of the Great Depression, he got himself a newspaper route, sold soda and magazine subscriptions door-to-door, and studied 1,000 Ways to Make $1,000 like his protestant forebears did the Holy Bible.
It was fun!
When he got into investing, each trade became like a stroke of his brush, his portfolio became his canvas.
With it, he built one of the greatest careers as an investor the world had ever known.
Today, thousands flock to his annual shareholders’ meetings, many having been made millionaires many times over simply because they’d bought shares years before.
Warren Buffett found his purpose early and built a life around it.
If only it were so easy for the rest of us! We, who weren’t built with calculating machines in our heads like Mr. Buffett’s, who don’t pore over annual reports with glee, and wouldn’t know whether to buy or dump its authors’ stock when done.
Most of us aren’t preternaturally good at one thing, but somewhat good at many things. We aren’t obsessed with one pursuit, but wouldn’t mind a bit of success in many of them. What to do?
Well, there’s this: Buffett’s mind isn’t as one-track as it first appears.
Every archetypal hero undergoes his or her time in the wilderness. Buffett’s strategy has always been to buy underpriced stocks and hold them until they achieved their potential value. In the 1960s, when the market was red-hot and just about every stock was priced too high to fit Buffett’s estimation of its worth, he quit.
While everyone else kept buying, unchecked growth beyond one’s means made the Midwesterner raised on Depression Era frugality uneasy. So Buffett shut his first fund down, returned everyone’s money, and retained only a few problem children. One of these was a textile manufacturer: Berkshire Hathaway.
Seemingly done with professional investing in his 30s, Buffett FIRE’d before Mr. Money Mustache’s dad could grow facial hair. But Buffett couldn’t stop. He advised friends on how to run their companies, wrote letters to Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders, and dispensed his unique mix of financial wisdom and cracker-barrel proverbs to rapt audiences at social gatherings just as he had in college.
It was only years later when the economic crises of the 70s burst the Go-Go bubble of the 60s that Buffett got back in using capital from Berkshire Hathaway’s textile factories. After the crash, a great many companies were once again priced lower than they were worth, and Buffett could beat his previous high scores in the money game while everyone else was too cash-strapped to play.
But Buffett wanted to level up. No longer keen merely to leap from underpriced stock to underpriced stock like a vaudeville jockey switching racehorses, he used his winnings to buy seats at the tables of his favorite childhood companies. He joined the board of The Washington Post, one of his favorite customers as a paperboy. He developed a lifelong friendship with its publisher, Katherine Graham, and helped her turn the struggling paper around. He would do the same for other brands he’d loved since boyhood or ones he’d since fallen in love with and wanted to see prosper. Companies like Coca Cola, ABC, and Salomon Inc., who saw Buffett as a safe haven from the corporate raiders of the 1980s. Rather than enriching himself through a company’s hostile takeover and then selling it off for parts, Buffett preferred to buy a company and guide it to greater profitability. It might take longer, but it made everyone happier.
In the ensuing years, Berkshire Hathaway would continue its practice of hanging back and amassing large reserves of cash while everyone else was in a spending frenzy. They made a killing after the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, and again after the subprime mortgage meltdown. Even today, while most of us are marveling at our impossibly high stock investments, Buffett is waiting for the inevitable correction. He’s ready to pounce. However, even at 90, the world’s 4th richest man hasn’t got it all figured out. Nobody does.
The “Oracle of Omaha” started with a natural aptitude for numbers, a fascination with money, and a good dollop of old-fashioned decency. He knew he wanted to do something with money, he might even have known it would involve investing. But he could not have guessed all the wonderful ways in which his ‘purpose’ would come to touch all his other childhood passions, from his love of cola and media to his penchant for letter-writing and amusing anecdotes. His annual letters to shareholders have been published as best-selling anthologies, while his talks on finance draw crowds numbering in the thousands. His donations to charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are having a greater impact on the world than many small nations. Had he not “retired” early in his career and rediscovered his other passions, it’s doubtful his legacy would have been so expansive.
It’s easy in retrospect to look on the near-complete canvas of a 90-year-old, highly-successful investor and say that it was all bound to happen. But nobody knows for sure as it’s happening. Even Buffett thought he was done over half a century ago, not realizing that he hadn’t even begun many of the achievements and hallmarks that make Buffett a uniquely-American icon. So while it might be easier to sell a book with a set of steps and worksheets to “find your purpose”, the truth is that purpose isn’t found, it’s made.
“Purpose” takes shape through the incalculable number of decisions and actions each of us takes throughout our lives. From the relatively innocuous ones like how much to tip, to the major ones like accepting a job, to the seemingly-innocuous-yet-incredibly-consequential ones, like whether to give over some of our twenty-four hours to a growing addiction. We might “define our purpose” after attending a workshop or setting some resolutions in the new year. CEOs may even hang it behind the reception desk and revisit it daily. But if they aren’t acted upon, made reality, manifested in some way, then they are just platitudes. The fact remains that it isn’t until we step back and see the sum of our works that one’s purpose can be clearly defined.
Many spend their lives looking for a purpose, only to find that searching is itself a purpose. Had they not spent years agonizing over the right path, they might have enjoyed their journey. Others think that one’s purpose is fixed, and make much smaller lives for themselves than if they had grown and evolved. And then there’s the saddest bunch, who convince themselves that their purpose is elsewhere. But for whatever circumstances they found themselves mired in, they’d do something so much greater. All the while unwilling to explore and develop our natural aptitudes and running from the responsibilities that come with them.
We all have skills, purpose emerges from our willingness to put them to use.
Warren Buffett’s true purpose in life isn’t investing, business advising, essay writing, public speaking, or philanthropy, it’s the wholehearted enjoyment of his natural aptitudes and an unwillingness to shirk the responsibilities that come with them. He could have bought overpriced stocks to make shareholders happy, he could have plundered the properties he bought for a quick buck, and he could have destroyed himself with the billions he acquired. Instead, he committed himself not just to improve his craft, but to create real value with it.
Still unsure what your purpose could be? Understand that fate only seems inevitable in hindsight.
As Buffett once wrote about crucial decisions like knowing when to sell a company,
That may seem easy to do when one looks through an always-clean, rear-view mirror. Unfortunately, however, it's the windshield through which investors must peer, and that glass is invariably fogged.
Oftentimes, the only difference between those who succeed and those who fail was the confidence, however seemingly misguided in the moment, that they would make it. Buffett had that confidence in himself, even when he didn’t have it for the market. So he quit. But even as he left, he never stopped using his abilities to help people. In the helping came his reinvigoration. We may not have Buffett’s acumen, but we can all work on what we’re good at and use that to make the things we take pleasure in better for others.
When it comes to purpose, there’s no better place to start.
Well-written, thoughtful, and rigorous as usual. All the successful people in the past not only discovered purpose, but they also met the opportunities and possibilities of their times. We can emulate them in their dedication and perseverance, but we can't replicate their successes exactly. The difficult challenge is to find our unique circumstances precisely at the same time that we're trying to identify our own inner purpose.