Warren Buffett’s Best Advice for Young Investors (Life & Investing) | Berkshire 2025

[Transcript]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, my name is Marie. I’m from Melrose, Massachusetts. Thank you for the time today. As a young person interested in investing like myself, I would love to hear your insights, Mr. Buffett. What were some pivotal lessons you learned early in your career? And what advice do you have for young investors who are looking to develop their investment philosophy? Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: Those are good questions. I wish I thought of them myself earlier in my life.

You know who you associate with is just enormously important. And don't expect that you'll make every decision right on that. I mean, you're going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends.

I mentioned a few fellows that have died in the last couple years. Well, all of those people were people that, you know, if we were working together on something one-ten-thousandth the size of Berkshire, I mean they’d be the kind of people you’d choose. They’re people that make you want to be better than you are.

And you want to hang out with people that are better than you are and that you feel are better than you are because you’re going to go in the direction of the people you associate with, and that's something you'll learn. And of course, you’ve learned late in life. It’s hard to really appreciate how important some of those factors are until you get much older.

But when you’ve got people around you, like Tom Murphy and Sandy Gottesman and Walter Scott, you’re just going to live a better life than you do, if you just go out and look at somebody that’s making a lot of money and decide you’re going to try and copy them or something of the sort.

So I would try to be associated with smart people too where I could learn a lot from them, and I would try to look for something that I would do if I didn’t need the money. I mean what you’re really looking for in life is something where you’ve got a job that you’d hold if you didn’t need the money, and I’ve had that, and Charlie had it for a very, very long time.

Practically all the fellows I named had it, and they also – every one of those ones I named – they always did more than their share and they thought like they never sought more than their share of the credit. They just behave the way you’d like anybody you work with, and when you find them, you treasure them, and when you don’t find them, you still keep doing whatever causes you to eat or enables you to eat but you don’t give up on looking around, and you will find people do wonderful things for you.

I mentioned earlier that you know, going down to GEICO, and knocking on the door when the door was locked. I mean, who knows what was behind that door? Went in, but in 10 minutes, I found that I had a man (Lorimer Davidson) that was going to be just wonderfully helpful to me.

And of course, if somebody’s going to be helpful to you, you want to try to figure out ways to be helpful to them. So you get a compounding of good intentions and good behavior. And unfortunately, you can get the reverse of that in life, too.

And you know with a lot of – I was lucky in having a good environment for living that kind of life, and other people, you know, have a whole different environmental situation they have to overcome it. But don’t feel guilty about your good luck if you’ve got it.

Well, if you live in the United States, there are 8 billion people in the world, and there are 330 million in the United States, you've already won the game to a great degree, and then just keep making the most of it.

But you don’t want to associate with people or enterprises that ask you to do something that or tell you to do something that you shouldn’t be doing. And that’s one of the problems. I mean different professions select for different types of people.

And it’s interesting to me that in the investment business, so many people get out of it after they’ve made a pile of money. You really want something that you’ll stick around for, whether you need the money – Greg doesn’t need the money, Ajit doesn’t need the money, remotely, but they enjoy what they do and they’re so damn good at it.

Well I've had the advantage of seeing how that works over time. The best manager I ever knew – and there’s a lot of contention for who that would be – but actually was Tom Murphy Sr., who lived to almost 98.

And I’ve never seen anybody who could get the potential out of other people more than Murph could. I mean if you want to become a better person, you want to work for Tom Murphy, and there are all kinds of successful people that really don't have that sort of – don’t bring that to the party.

And I’m not saying that’s the only way to succeed, but I think it’s the most pleasant way to succeed for sure.

And I think that the Berkshire experience is pretty dramatic. I mean, to operate with Sandy Gottesman from 1963 until he died a couple of years ago, Walter Scott for 30 years. Greg, operate with them for 25 years or so?

GREG ABEL: Right yeah 30.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah and you know you really can’t miss. You know you’ll learn all the time. But you’ll not only learn how to be successful at business, you’ll learn how to be successful at life. And so that’s my recommendation.

And for some reason, apparently you live longer too. It’s pretty amazing – (Laughs) – I mean, these people I’m talking about, including myself. I mean, I’d like to attribute it to this (Warren holds up a Cherry Coke), and a few other things. (Laughter & Applause)

But I think a happy person lives longer than somebody that’s doing some things that they don’t really admire that much in life.

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

 

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