Warren Buffett, billionaire investor, gives career advice: “Look for the job you’d take if you didn’t need a job”
None of the Oracle of Omaha’s children followed him into the world of investment but that was okay for him as they had followed his career advice.
It can be difficult to follow in a parent’s footsteps, especially if that parent is the Oracle of Omaha. However, Warren Buffett never expected that of his own three children.
He gave them the same advice that his own father gave him when he was a kid, which came from an 1841 essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’. Paraphrasing the Sage of Concord’s words, Buffett told his children: “Look for the job you’d take if you didn’t need a job,” i.e. you need to find an occupation that suits you, and not what others, even your parents, feel you should pursue.
In the essay Emerson urges readers not to blindly follow expectations of society which preaches conformity and thus stifles individuality. But instead, he advises that people trust their own intuition and thoughts so that they can be authentic and self-sufficient in their lives.
Warren Buffett says to find your calling
While it may seem that Buffett didn’t follow his own father’s advice, Howard Buffett owned a stock brokerage firm, he says that he knew investing was what he wanted to do by the time he was five years old. “It was just interesting to me — way more interesting to me than it was to my dad,” he shared with CNBC during the network’s two-hour special on the billionaire, ‘Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy’.
Buffett acknowledges that not everyone will find their calling as early in life as he did and it may require some trial and error. Additionally, that in the search for a job that you’d be happy doing even if you weren’t paid, you may run up against “economic realities.”
Nevertheless, he urged students in a 2021 letter to shareholders, “never to give up the quest, for when they find that sort of job, they will no longer be ‘working.’”
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