The day after Graham died, Buffett arrived, as scheduled, to speakto an audience of college students at the Terry College of Business at theUniversity of Georgia. He climbed onto the stage wearing his stiff graysuit and looking only a little more awkward than usual, his breathy voicegrating slightly. "Testing, one million, two million, three million," he saidat the microphone. This line could always be counted on to get a laugh,and it did. He then launched into a couple of Nebraska football jokes but,out of character, rushed the punch-line and got only chuckles from theaudience.
Then he seemed to catch his rhythm. "People ask me where theyshould go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom theyadmire the most," he said. He urged them not to waste their time andtheir life. "It's crazy to take little in-between jobs just because they lookgood on your resume. That's like saving sex for your old age. Do what youlove and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourselfthe best chance in life you can."
They asked him what mistakes he had made. Number one wasBerkshire Hathaway, he said-spending twenty years trying to revive afailing textile mill. Second, US Air. Buffett spoke of his failure to call theAir-aholic hotline beforehand. Third, he said, had been buying the Sinclairgas station as a young man. That mistake, he reckoned, had cost himabout $6 billion compared to what he could have earned on the moneyinvested.
But his mistakes of omission-things he could have done and didn'tdo-had plagued him most, he said. He mentioned only one-failing tobuy FNMA stock, the Federal National. Mortgage Association. That, hesaid, had cost about $5 billion as of that date. There were others: passingon the television station that Tom Murphy had tried to sell him; notinvesting in Wal-Mart. The reason that he had made mostly mistakes ofomission instead of commission, he explained, was his cautious approachto life.
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