2014年伯克希尔股东会问答：
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. Bung — this — Mr. Buffett, Mr. Munger, my name is Nicholas Erdenberger. I hail from the beautiful Garden State of New Jersey. And I guess the — (laughs) — I guess the question —
WARREN BUFFETT: Withhold your applause, applause. (Laughter)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I guess this is a follow up question to the question before.
I really connect with the idea of not investing in industries you can’t fully understand. Being a young guy who has limited ability to code and who can’t build robots, tech is certainly not an industry I fully understand.
And yet these days, the concept of entrepreneurship is nearly synonymous with tech amongst people my age. So my question to you, Mr. Buffett, is if you were 23-years-old with entrepreneurial tendencies, what non-tech industry would you start a business in and why?
WARREN BUFFETT: I’d probably do just what I did when I was 23. (Laughs)
The — you know, I would go in the investment business. And I would look at lots of companies and I would go and talk to lots of people, and I would try to learn from them what I could about different industries.
One thing I did when I was 23, if I got interested in the coal business, I would go out and see the CEOs of eight or ten coal companies. And the interesting thing was I never made appointments usually or anything, I just dropped in. But they —they felt a fellow from Omaha who looked like me couldn’t be too harmful.
So they’d always see me. And I would — I’d ask them a lot of questions, but one question I’d always ask them, two questions at the end, I would ask them if they had to put all of their money into any coal company except their own and go away for ten years and couldn’t change it, which one would it be and why?
And then I would say, after I got an answer to that, I would say, and if as part of that deal they had to sell short in the equivalent amount of money — in one coal company — which would it be and why?
And if I went around and talked to everybody in the coal business about that, I would know more about the coal companies from an economic standpoint than any one of those managers probably would.
So, I think there’s lots of ways to learn about business. You’re not going learn how to start another Facebook or Google that way, but you can — you can learn a lot about the economic characteristics of companies by reading, personal contact.
You do have to have — you have to have a real curiosity about it. I mean, you — I don’t think you can do it because your mother’s telling you to do it, or something of the sort. (Laughs)
I think you — it really has to turn you on. And I mean, what could turn you on more than running around asking questions about coal companies? (Laughter)
You have to maybe be a little odd, too.
But that’s what I would do. And I might, in the process of doing that, find some industry that particularly interested me, in my case the insurance industry did, and you might become very well equipped, even perhaps, to start your own insurance company, but perhaps to pick the most logical one to go to work for.
If you just keep learning things, something will come along that you’ll find extremely useful to do. I mean, it — but you’ve got to be open to it. Charlie?
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, you might try a version of the trick that Larry Bird used. When he wanted an agent to negotiate his new contract, he asked every agent why he should be selected. And if he was not going be selected, whom the agent would recommend. And since everybody recommended the same number two choice, Larry Bird just hired him and negotiated the best contract in history. There’s —
WARREN BUFFETT: Well —
CHARLIE MUNGER: — there are a lot of tricks that people use.
WARREN BUFFETT: We did the same thing with Solomon, actually. It was a Saturday morning —
CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah.
WARREN BUFFETT: — when I call —and you were there, Charlie, weren’t you? -
CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes —
WARREN BUFFETT: — I wasn’t sure.
I called in, I don’t know whether it was eight or ten of the manager — I had just gotten in there on Friday afternoon, and now it’s Saturday morning and we had to open for business Sunday night in Tokyo, and I had to have somebody to run the place.
So I called in eight people and I said, you know, “Who besides you would be the ideal person to run this, and why?”
One guy told me that there was nobody compared to him. (Laughter)
He was gone from the firm within a few months. (Laughter)
But — the — it’s not a bad system to use.
You can really learn a lot just by asking. I mean, it’s starting to sound a little bit like a Yogi Berra quote or something, but it is — it is literally true that you — if you talk to enough people about something they know something about, and people like to talk. You know, and — here we are talking ourselves. (Laughs)
And you just have to be open to it. And you will find your spot. You may not find it the first day, or the week, or month, but you’ll find what fascinates you.
I was very lucky because I found what fascinated me when I was seven or eight years of age. But — you know, some people find chess or music, you know, fascinates them when they’re four or five.
If you’re lucky you find it early, and sometimes it takes you longer, but you’ll find it.
CHARLIE MUNGER: If it’s a very competitive business, and it plainly requires the qualities that you lack, it should probably be avoided.
I could — when I was at Caltech I took thermodynamics, and Homer Joe Stewart, who was a genius, taught the course. And it was fairly apparent to me that no amount of time or effort would turn me into a Homer Joe Stewart. He was utterly, impossibly more talented than I could be.
Gave up. I immediately said I wasn’t going try and be a professor of thermodynamics at Caltech. And I’ve done that with field after field, and pretty soon there was only one or two left. (Laughter)
WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I had a similar experience in athletics. (Laughter)
关于如何找到自己喜欢的事业，不难看出芒格仍然是反过来想，他的建议是找到自己不擅长的，使用排除法。
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