Three things Warren Buffett’s lunch guests learned from him

After 2007, when two investors, Guy Spier and Mohnish Pabrai, bought the lunch with Warren Buffett for a total of $650,000, the bids called for the lunch with the “Oracle of Omaha” shot up significantly. In 2022, the highest bid was around $19 million. This record sum probably also came about because after two years of the corona pandemic, it was the last time a power lunch with the stock market guru was auctioned off.

However, the true value of such a lunch with Warren Buffett is probably much higher. At least that’s what the highest bidding investors said in 2007. “I think we would have been prepared to pay a lot more,” Mohnish Pabrai told CNBC back in 2010. It was worth every cent. In fact, the three things Pabrai and Spier said they learned during the Buffett lunch are timeless and invaluable. The two investors shared these three important business lessons with CNBC and in a field report published by MarketWatch.

Lesson 1: Cultivate integrity

Integrity is very important to him and his long-time business partner, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett told his two dinner guests during their lunch together. Pabrai later told “CNBC” that Buffett and Munger always used some sort of internal standard to guide their actions. To determine the level of their own integrity, Buffett asked Spier and Pabrai a question: “Would you rather be the best lover in the world but known as the worst, or would you rather be the worst lover in the world but known as the best?” ” If you could answer this question correctly, you would have found the correct internal benchmark, Buffett is said to have said. Buffett is considered a great advocate of integrity and admitted that he always looks for this key quality in all of his employees.

Lesson 2: Learning to say “no.”

In his 2014 article for MarketWatch, Guy Spier wrote that Buffett said that “the difference between successful people and really successful people” is that “truly successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” Buffett himself always lives by this maxim. The star investor Spier is said to have shown his pocket calendar at their “power lunch”, which was almost empty. “He likes to have room for spontaneity,” says Spier. An interview with also showed that Buffett has had this habit for a very long time Bill Gates, in which the Microsoft boss said that Buffett had already presented him with his almost empty appointment calendar in 1991. After the “power lunch,” Spier also decided to say “no” more often. He found it remarkable that Buffett had no problem enduring the temporary inconvenience of saying “no,” even though he himself was a likeable man.

Lesson 3: Do what you love

Warren Buffett’s most famous lesson is the importance of doing something you love. A quote attributed to the stock market doyen is: “When you’re dealing with people you love and doing what you love, it can’t get any better.” After their lunch with him, Spier and Pabrai were convinced that Buffett loves his job. Spier later reported that the billionaire’s love for his job was “overwhelming.” An essential characteristic of such a job that you love is that you would still like to do this job even if you don’t need the money, Buffett said in 2017 in front of 40,000 listeners at the shareholders’ meeting of his investment holding company Berkshire Hathaway. The billionaire once told “PBS NewsHour” that he could “be very happy with $100,000 a year (…).”

Nevertheless, according to Forbes, Warren Buffett is worth more than $100 billion – a fortune that also speaks for the validity of the star investor’s lessons. And this in turn will ensure that his wisdom continues to receive great attention in the stock market community.

Editorial team finanzen.net

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