When Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett talks to college students, he offers some valuable career advice: Look for personal fulfillment over net income.
That means pursuing a job that you actually enjoy, in a workplace with talented people that you actively admire, Buffett wrote in his annual letter to shareholders on Saturday. Or, to put it another way, he advised: jobseekers should look for a job in the field “they would choose if they didn’t need money”.
“Economic realities, I admit, can hinder this kind of demand,” Buffett continued. “However, I urge students never to give up the search, because when they find this kind of job, they will no longer ‘work.’
The 91-year-old billionaire – currently the fifth richest man in the world, with a net worth of 114.7 billion dollars according to Forbes – speaks from personal experience. In his letter, Buffett wrote that he and his business partner, Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s vice president, both began as “part-time” at his grandfather’s grocery store in the early 1940s, where they were they were “assigned boring tasks and paid little.”
“Job satisfaction continued to elude them,” Buffett wrote, even as they branched out into selling securities and law, respectively. That changed when the duo “found what [they loved] to do ”in Berkshire, which Buffett bought in 1965, forcing the company’s previous management to leave.
At the time, Berkshire was a troubled textile company. Today, it is an investment and holding company that owns or holds long-term stakes in businesses such as Geico, Fruit of the Loom, American Express and Coca-Cola. It has a market capitalization of $ 708.61 billion as of Tuesday morning.
Buffett’s wealth was largely due to the last decades of Berkshire’s financial success, and in his letter, Buffett attributed this success in part to finding people he and Munger loved to work with. “We hire decent and talented people – no fools,” Buffett wrote. “The turnover is on average maybe one person a year.”
Berkshire may have been ahead of the curve in this regard: low turnover is becoming increasingly known as a recipe for particularly productive and profitable jobs. As CNBC Make It recently noted, “enthusiastic remnants” – who make up a third of the workforce – are more engaged, more productive and help businesses become more profitable, according to a December 2020 study published in the Journal of Managerial Issues.
Buffett seems to agree with these findings.
“With very few exceptions, we have now been ‘working’ for many decades with people we like and trust,” he wrote. “It’s the joy of life.”
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