Warren Buffett’s Advice for Hard Times (Watch This When You Feel Low) | Berkshire 2025

[Transcript]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good morning, Mr. Buffett, Mr. Greg, and Mr. Ajit. My name is Peter Chan. I’m from Shanghai, China. This is my first time attending this shareholders’ meeting. I would like to ask a question about the wisdom of life. Have you ever encountered any major setbacks or low points in your life, and how did you get through, and overcome them? Thank you very much.

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, everybody gets setbacks, and some people have particularly bad luck in that respect, and others get through with fairly minors. But Charlie you know, he had setbacks. I had setbacks, I mean it's part of life, and they’re not any fun.

I don’t have any great advice for you about, you know having the time of your life while you’re having some major setbacks, but you know it comes with lifetime. You certainly have a setback when you die. (Laughs) And so everybody’s got setbacks guaranteed to them.

But some people get, and I mean, it is no laughing matter in a sense, because I mean, people get extraordinary bad luck, and other people get extraordinary good luck. Usually, the people who get good luck don’t really think it was so much luck as themselves.

But if you're just going to have it I think you're going to — I think that you’re less likely to have it in terms of medical problems. In terms of, you know, various things in life. I mean, you were born at a good time.

If you look all the way through the history of China, when would you rather have been born? You know, 100 years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago or now? You know it’s just hands down. You’d be lucky.

I mean, you know, if I came from 20 generations of shepherds, I think I get kind of tired of my life just looking at these sheep every day. But you know, we can sit here, and I can watch Nebraska. Not quite play the same game of football that we played 20 years ago.

But I mean, everything in life has been made so much better that you’ve got to figure that you do a lucky straw by, you know, staying in the womb for a couple hundred thousand years, and then just emerging it at the right time.

So I would focus on the things that have been good in your life rather than the bad things that have happened. Because bad things do happen, but it can often be a wonderful life.

You could get terrible breaks in it. So far, that really hasn’t happened with me. But it happened with some of my friends, but he gets some bad breaks from time to time. But for 94 years, I’ve been able to drink whatever I want to drink. And you know, they predict all kinds of terrible things for me, but it hasn’t happened yet. (Laughter & Applause)

And it's true, I mean, if you look at what pro football players are making now, and everything compared to what they were making 30 or 40 years ago, you can say, well, isn't that wonderful? But if you look at the lifespan of professional athletes, after a while, you get to decide that you’re better off if you really weren’t the first one chosen to be on the baseball team or the basketball team, or anything else.

Charlie, and I, and I think I speak for the others to some extent, that we never did, we never really exercised that much or did anything. (Laughter) We were carefully preserving ourselves for years. (Laughter)

So look at the bright side of things to the extent that you can. You know you’re lucky enough you’re here today. You’re healthy, and you come from a long distance, and you’re getting a chance to learn more about something that interests you, and compare that with the situation a couple of hundred years ago that you would have been offered.

So anyway, that’s enough moralizing. (Applause)

Source: https://buffett.cnbc.com/2025-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting/

 

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