“When I was a kid…I got all kinds of good things. I had the advantage of a home where people talked about interesting things, and I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I don’t think I could have been raised with a better pair of parents. That was enormously important. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery.”
Warren Buffett is unequivocally gratified with his childhood. His parents’ astuteness swayed him favourably to be a gifted man. The education that they bestowed him was central to the development of his persona. Buffett’s explicit gratitude toward his parents underscores that he adores them utterly, notwithstanding their flaws. The metaphorical ‘Ovarian Lottery’ emphasizes Buffett’s delight with his heritage; he is not remorseful about his persona.
“Warren would pick up his stopwatch and summon his sisters to join him in the bathroom they shared to watch the new game he had invented. He filled the bathtub with water and picked up his marbles. Each had a name. He lined them up on the flat edge at the back of the tub. Then he clicked the stopwatch just as he swept the marbles into the water. They raced down the porcelain slope, clicking and rattling, jumping as they hit the waterline. The marbles chased each other toward the stopper. When the first one hit, Warren punched the stopwatch and declared the winner. His sisters watched him race the marbles over and over, trying to improve their times. The marbles never tired, the stopwatch never erred, and—unlike his audience—Warren never seemed bored by the repetition. Warren thought about numbers all the time and everywhere, even in church. "
Warren Buffett’s childhood captivation with the stopwatch is a patent pointer of his fondness for numbers which portrays the longing he had to work with numbers from his childhood. The plays that he invents as a child render him an individual with a growth and novel mind-set. The competitive nature that he illustrates in his games is an imitation of his business shrewdness which displays when he gets into business career. Buffer’s partiality for repetition mirrors his inherent tenacity that would enable him to confront risks in commerce engagements. Buffett’s fascination with numbers is a stimulus which makes is easy for him to frame business schemes later on in his life. By all accounts, Buffett was preordained to be a global businessman because his childhood intimates a judicious insight that would be apposite in business setting. The insight of numbers impacts his spiritual mind-set based on how he deducts that the lifespans of the religious individuals would be relatively lengthier than those of the non-religious individuals. His skepticism towards religion is attributed to the religion’s failure to substantiate right his premises concerning the number of years. Accordingly, numbers are the axis of Buffett’s philosophy regarding various matters counting spirituality.
“Warren particularly disliked buying houses, considering money spent on them as lying fallow, not earning its keep. Susie needled him about money. “If we were rich,” she said, “you would just go up to that house, and ask the owner how much she wants for it, and pay however much she asked. But I know we’re not rich.” In their perpetual tug-of-war, however, Susie was usually able to dislodge the cash from him in the end. Buffett eventually sent Roy Tolles’s wife, Martha, a canny bargainer, to negotiate for the house. She dickered the owner down to $150,000, and when Roy Tolles called to tell Warren, he said, “I have bad news. You bought it.”
Warren Buffett’s repugnance for procuring houses depicts his standpoint on investment. For him acquiring a house is tantamount to discarding money because the house would not crop any returns. Warren is economical with his finances because he believes in investing. Comparatively, Susie endorses the opinion that affluent people, such as Buffett, should not find it hard to secure the posh houses. Buffett validates the idea that being prosperous is not a validation for overindulgence and superfluous expenditures. Perhaps, it is this outlook, of accountability, which has subsidized Buffett’s permanence in the business world as well as his momentous business endeavors.
