Your personal snowball, start with a flake

By Fiona Boyd |

Last October I had the very good fortune to join David in San Francisco, and enjoy a few days there. It was my first time in the US, and I enjoyed every minute of it, which is just as well as I’d been feeling rather flat at home.

I’d packed a couple of books to read on the flight, which I’d been warned by David and many others, is a real killer. Melbourne to San Francisco goes via Sydney and while the Sydney to SF leg is only 14 hours, there’s a longish wait in Sydney and the journey door-to-door ended up being around 20 hours.

Now I hasten to add that my last big plane trip of this kind was taken when I was 13 in December of 1979 flying unaccompanied Perth to London. I seem to remember the plane stopping a couple of times, once in Calcutta when the plane was searched by the military and I quaked as they poked around with rifles. All up I think the trip was about 32 hours.

Even though I was well-prepared with reading material on my San Francisco flight, I did, as I usually do at an airport, succumb to purchasing a couple of books at the airport bookstore. What is it with books, they seem so scrummy when you’re about to board a plane for a long trip? They also appear very delectable when you enter my favourite bookstore on the planet, The Avenue Bookstore, in Albert Park, but that’s altogether another story. One of those I bought and commenced reading immediately on the Sydney leg of the journey and then burrowed in with a glass of white wine and a very ordinary pasta salad at the food hall at Sydney airport, and continued for the first 5 hours of the SF journey was the biography of Warren Buffett, “The Snowball” written by Alice Schroeder.

What I like about this book is that Schroeder makes it clear that Warren asked her to write his biography, having no doubt turned down many other professional writers over the years who wanted that privilege. Schroeder had business dealings with Buffett, had been the Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and these days writes and is a consultant analyst. She may go on to do so from hereon in, but her business to date has not been writing biographies.

Buffett made it clear to Schroeder that she was to interview him, then everybody else and then publish the most unflattering version. And reading the book really is a delight, there is no sense of a powerful and influential persona leaning on the author to present the story in a glorified way, it’s often warts and all and very believable and entertaining because of that.

Life is like a snowball.

The unifying idea of the book is the notion that Warren Buffett’s success became a snowball, a large self-motivated mass propelling itself into the future gathering force and momentum along the way. But the journey that is a great success, must start somewhere and in this book, it was with a handful of snow that was compacted into a small ball and then rolled on the snow-covered ground to collect more snow and indeed grow larger and larger until it had somewhat of a will of its own.

The snowball as a metaphor is a really valuable way to look at life more generally. What’s interesting in reading “The Snowball” to me, was that Warren Buffett was not particularly gifted with the usual pre-conditions we might expect for wild and vast success. His family life wasn’t happy, his mother wasn’t very maternal and there was a real harshness to her treatment of both Warren and his older sister, Doris. He escaped his mother’s bouts of rage by staying with friends and hanging out with his friends’ families. It’s true he does seem pretty intelligent in the book, but it’s even more true that his intelligence shines when he applies it to what he’s genuinely fascinated by and interested in – for him it was ways of making money and the fundamental value sitting inside a business, and of course that value expressed as a stock.

What’s really interesting about Warren is that from a very early age he appears totally intrinsically motivated – that is, he’s motivated by his own internal drives rather than motivated by other’s expectations, or by a carrot or stick. Warren’s desire to make money started very early with paper rounds, lemonade stands and the like. He had his teachers and gurus, however he chose them, not the other way round. Buffett was pretty clear on what he needed to know to achieve his next step, and who it was he could learn from.

Intrinsic motivation is a fascinating thing. If you’re motivated by your inner desires, then you’ll have the motive power to go through virtually any disadvantage on your way to achieving those desires. But that isn’t how most people live their lives is it?

Reading “The Snowball” was instructive for me. It was a reminder of a set of values I’ve long held to be true. That your destiny is your own, that outward success is irrelevant, though it can be a nice irrelevance, if it takes front seat then it becomes a distraction. That life has plenty of bumps and dips and that if you want to have a big, worthy snowball at the end of your life, you better figure out what drives you, what your inner values are and then stick to them. Whilst I’m a big believer in getting some downtime into your life, I’m a bigger believer in getting inspired and staying that way. Once you’re inspired with what’s right for you, you don’t such need a plan as you usually have your overall direction set – you’ll scan the environment and look for knowledge and resources you may need, and you’ll find the ethical and civil ways to go about getting access to that knowledge and those resources.

As we launch into the New Year, I’d like to consider what your personal snowflake is. That germ of desire/ideas/values that can propel you into being all that you can be and that will help you to follow your passion every single day. As Buffett points out, much of life is about the value of compounding. If you can stick to something that is true for you, find the ways of making it of value to others and then just stay with it through the thick and thin – then you have a really good chance of being “The Snowball” of your field of endeavour. The longer you do what you do, the more you’ll know about it, what works and what doesn’t, the more you’ll be able to ride different phases and times, the bigger and stronger your ‘snowball’ will be.

If you don’t know it already, in 2010, what will be your starting point? What is your snowflake?

Photo: Flickr redjar

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