Value Investing Workshop in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai: Before we begin, a quick personal note. I’m bringing my full-day offline Value Investing Workshop to three cities this September:
- Chennai — Sunday, 6th September
- Bengaluru — Sunday, 20th September
- Mumbai — Sunday, 27th September
Very few seats remain in each city. Once those go, that’s it until next year.
Click here for details and registration.
Now, on to today’s letter.
Warren Buffett turned 96 years old a few days ago, on 30th August 2026. He bought his first stock at the age of 11, which means he has now spent about 85 years at this game, and at 96 he is still the man most of us in this business measure ourselves against.
It felt like a good moment to sit down and think about him once more.
I have been writing about his lessons on Safal Niveshak for more than 15 years now. I’ve analysed his letters, some businesses he bought and the lessons embedded in such decision making, and most importantly his ways of sizing up businesses in general, management quality, and valuations.
And the reason I have continued to infuse his lessons in most of my commentary is because unlike most other investors whose processes have been clouded by mystery and complexity, Buffett has been the most open teacher who has generously shared all that he could, by way of simple folksy narratives.
He has been like that kindergarten teacher who taught me 99% of what I needed to be a good investor and live a good life. And I keep coming back to him because the ideas are usable by me as an ordinary investor.
Like, while his mentor Ben Graham first talked about the idea of ‘margin of safety’ in investing, it was the way Buffett taught that made an investor in me look at a falling stock with less panic or never overpay for a good business. It was the way he taught about ‘circle of competence’ that I stopped buying things I did not understand and avoided a lot of anguish and wealth destruction.
But, amidst all this, something has bothered me for years. Like I mentioned above, Buffett hid nothing, and wrote it down in plain language, one letter at a time, and then sat on a stage in Omaha every May and answered questions for hours. His biographer, Alice Schroeder, followed him around for years and gave us a thousand pages of Snowball.
If any great investor ever made himself an open book, it was this man. And after all of that, we still do not have another one. Nobody has come close.
I assumed for a long time that the reason there was no other Warren Buffett was some rare intelligence the rest of us lacked. But, over time, I have changed my view on that.
The world is made up of a lot of super-smart people who have tried to invest like Buffett and failed. So, it’s not their brains that give way. What gives way is the emotional and mental makeup Buffett has brought to investing that’s terribly difficult to practice, and for long.
So let me talk about the parts of Buffett that most of us skip over when we quote him. This may not be an all-inclusive list, for my mind could reach only five of them.
1. The wiring he was born without
Let’s start with something nobody wants to admit is hard. Buffett did not feel the pull of the crowd the way you and I feel it. In 1999, with the whole market drunk on technology stocks, he sat quietly. Barrons put him on the cover and asked whether he had lost his touch. He said almost nothing in his defence and let two years go by before the market proved him right.
In India, a lot of us have grown up with the “Log kya kahenge?” mindset. What will people think of us? It lies underneath so many of our money and life decisions. And I’m sure this is not an Indian phenomenon. Humans are social-approval seeking beings. We make a lot of decisions in life based on how others around us will see us.
Buffett, it seems, missed that wire. He talked about the idea of living and investing with an ‘inner scorecard,’ which you can explain to someone over one cup of coffee. But knowing that an inner scorecard exists and actually living by it are completely different things altogether.
2. He built a life that protected his mind
Buffett arranged his whole life around one deep, driving desire, which was to guard his own thinking.
He lived in Omaha, far from the noise of Wall Street. And the big one that’s not often talked about was the ammunition he built to act on his genius, which was the insurance float. Berkshire runs on premium money that Buffett got to invest, and people who gave him this money could not redeem it when the markets fell.
Now, think what that means for a fund manager working out of Nariman Point or BKC in Mumbai or Manhattan in New York. He may have all the patience in the world, but his investors can still redeem at the bottom. His boss still wants an explanation (for underperformance) every four weeks. When the market drops 20-30%, SIPs stop, and the withdrawals happen, he ends up selling at the exact moment he should be buying. Not to mention that Nariman Point or BKC in India, or Manhattan in the US are places which I think have the highest noise and ego per square foot in the world.
Buffett took that machine out of his own life before it could ever break him. To do that, you must know your weak points well enough to guard them with an iron wall years before they are tested. Most of us never get to that kind of honesty about ourselves.
3. The colder side
This I think is one of the biggest side-effects of the life Buffett built, where he had to let go of things he was attached to. This included many decisions he may have been proud of, some of his relationships, and the business his firm grew out of. Berkshire began as a textile company, and in the end, Buffett shut those very mills that gave the company its name.
If you read Schroeder closely, you will notice the same distance appearing at his home, in stretches where the family came second to work.
The clearest example was his marriage. Warren and Susie married in 1952 and raised three children in Omaha. But after 25 years, she moved to San Francisco to build a life of her own. They never divorced, and she stayed close to him till her last day. She was even the one who found Astrid Menks and asked her to look after Warren at home.
Then, when he was about to lose her, the calm, measured man we all picture came undone. As mentioned in Snowball, while Susie was fighting oral cancer, he grew so scared of losing her that he cried for hours. She died in 2004, and his grief ran so deep that he could not bring himself to go to her funeral.
This is the same man who could study a business with total detachment and move past it without a second thought. But with the woman who had held him together for over 50 years, that same detachment left him with plenty to mourn and a few things he wished he had done differently as a husband and as a father.
Much later Buffett owned up to what had gone wrong. He put the blame for the separation almost fully on himself:
It was definitely ninety-five percent my fault—no question about that. It may even have been ninety-nine percent. I just wasn’t attuned enough to her, and she’d always been perfectly attuned to me.
He admitted that Susie had slowly begun coming second to the work, that she felt less needed than he should have made her feel.
Now, I mention this because it was a huge cost of being Warren Buffett. While the knack of keeping ‘what you feel’ apart from ‘what you decide’ is a real edge in investing, it’s also a hard way to live for the people around you. So, when an investor asks me why he cannot invest like Buffett, part of the answer is that he may not want to pay the costs Buffett paid in his life to become what he became.
4. Boredom test
Let’s now talk about the boredom problem. Buffett often said that he would rather read annual reports than go to parties and networking events. People would call this discipline, but I think discipline is what you reach for when the work bores you and you push through anyway. Buffett did not have to push. He loved it.
As a boy, he counted bottle caps and delivered newspapers and loved watching a small number get bigger. His frugal life and the old house he still lives in, came from the same source. He got more out of seeing his investment process work than out of anything the money he earned could buy.
You cannot fake this for long. A lot of people enjoy being investors till the markets are handing them a great performance. But the market finds them out in the end, and that’s when the charm ends.
If the daily work of investing feels like homework to you, you are already behind a man who treated it as the best part of his day and life.
5. Other side of the argument
Some people say none of the personal stuff matters as much as the era he was born into and also the country he was born in. Buffett himself talked about “winning the ovarian lottery”:
I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me being born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different.
Buffett’s growing up years coincided with a long American boom, and a market that was thinner and slower than the one we trade in today.
Think about what that boom meant for his returns. The American economy he put his money into went on one of the longest climbs any country has seen. When the whole economy around you keeps growing for decades, your good decisions get rewarded far more than the same decisions would in a country going nowhere, and that upward pull lasted through most of his investing life.
The market he started in was also a far kinder place to hunt for bargains. There was no internet and very few analysts. Information asymmetry was widespread as even when some of it was available, not many people were bothered to open the Moody’s manual in search for stock ideas. Only a patient young man willing to go through the pages could turn up companies selling for less than the cash sitting in their bank.
That edge has mostly dried up. Thousands of analysts, fund managers, investors, and machines now read every filing the second it appears, and the cheap and obvious gets snapped up within minutes.
And then, there is the gift of ‘time’. He bought his first stock at the age of 11 and has stayed in the game well into his 90s. The bulk of his fortune came only after he crossed 60. A long and healthy life gave compounding the decades it needs to do its slow work, and that sort of runway owes a fair bit to good genes and plain good fortune.
The reason I bring this up is because it keeps me honest about the rarity of being someone like Warren Buffett, or any great person in history for that matter. We tend to turn every part of a great person’s story into a lesson we can copy. Only some of it works that way.
Temperament we can slowly build in ourselves. The luck of when and where he was born is not available to anyone, and no effort on your part rewrites it. Telling those two apart matters, because it stops you from measuring your own life against a start far softer than the one you were given.
Finally, a lot of people say the real secret for Buffett’s success was Charlie Munger, that what we call Buffett was two minds working as one for fifty years, and one person copying it was never on the cards. I think there’s a great truth in that, too.
So, what to make of all this?
When someone asks me how to invest like Buffett, I have stopped reaching for the simplified answer about patience and compounding. Yes, the ideas themselves are simple, and I will keep sharing them, because they do help a lot of people. But knowing them was never the issue. What the ideas require to work is a temperament, and that is the thing most of us, me very much included, keep working on for a lifetime and still fall short on.
Maybe this is the more useful place to look. Watch how you behave when the crowd is certain you are wrong. Notice what happens inside you when a decision you were proud of turns bad. Those reactions shape your investing far more than one more book on Buffett ever will, and I say that as someone still sorting out his own.
And this is why, despite whatever some modern-day financial geniuses may claim from time to time, there will never be a second Warren Buffett.
It was never about a formula waiting for a clever enough person to copy. It was one man, with a rare way of being wired, dropped into a time and a place that suited that wiring, who then spent over eight decades building a life that guarded the very things most of us let slip away.
You could hand every word Buffett ever wrote to a thousand smart people, and you would still not get another one. It’s because the hard part was never in reading the words. Buffett himself kept pointing us back to them, and we kept looking past them, hunting for the “secret”.
The closest any of us can get to him is to work on our own temperament and carry it a little further than we did last year. That is not becoming Buffett. It is something simpler, and for an ordinary investor, that is enough.
Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.
“Template on how to lead a happier and fuller life.”
—Ramesh Damani, Member, BSE
“Teaches you how to think, judge, and behave…”
—Arnold V. D. Berg, Century Mgt.
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