9 Lessons I Learned from Warren Buffett about Patience, Simplicity, and Intelligent Investing #929976

There is a story I’ve always found irresistible. It involves a man who bought his first stock at the age of eleven. Most children at that age are preoccupied with comic books or baseball cards, but this boy, Warren Buffett, was charting the price movements of Cities Service Preferred.
He bought three shares for himself and three shares for his sister. And when the stock dipped, as stocks often do, he panicked. He sold at a small profit, only to watch it climb fivefold not long after.
That one moment is almost too perfect—like the opening scene of a novel where you can already see the shape of the ending. Here is the greatest investor of our time, caught in a small, very human mistake: impatience.
It is fitting that so much of Buffett’s philosophy, so many of the lessons he has repeated across decades, circles back to that single flaw he recognized in himself at eleven years old.
When we think about Warren Buffett, it is tempting to imagine a man of superhuman discipline. But that misses the point. Buffett is, in fact, human in the most ordinary sense.
He drinks Coca-Cola with the enthusiasm of a teenager. He eats hamburgers. He lives in the same house he bought in 1958.
And when he explains his ideas, he doesn’t resort to complicated models or opaque jargon. Instead, he uses parables and jokes, sometimes delivered in the flat, almost comic cadence of a Midwestern uncle.