Passing the Torch

Buffett’s fortune will mostly go to philanthropy. His ideas, though, are meant to be inherited — and those you can begin handing on today.

Ask Buffett and his late partner Charlie Munger what separates great investors from merely clever ones, and neither would have said intelligence. They say temperament. “A lot of people with high IQs,” Munger observed, “are terrible investors because they have terrible temperaments.” The good news for every parent is that temperament is not fixed at birth. It is shaped — by example, by conversation, and by a thousand small moments in which waiting was quietly rewarded.

Three things worth handing on

1. Delayed gratification as freedom, not sacrifice. Teach a child that the point of saving isn’t to have less — it’s to owe no one, to answer to no boss you didn’t choose, to keep the steering wheel of your own life. Framed that way, thrift stops feeling like deprivation and starts feeling like power.

2. Independent thinking. Markets, like playgrounds, are ruled by crowds — everyone excited at the top, everyone frightened at the bottom. The Shrewd habit is to notice the crowd and then think for yourself anyway. A child who learns to ask “but is that actually true?” has been handed a defence that will serve them far beyond money.

3. Ownership over consumption. The world will spend a fortune teaching your child to consume. Almost no one will teach them to own. Tilting that balance — helping them see themselves as a part-owner of great businesses rather than merely a customer of them — may be the most quietly radical thing you ever teach.

The Shrewd insight: The two truest marks of a happy life are simple — staying in control of your own life, and keeping a mind that never stops learning. Teach a child those two, and the compounding takes care of itself.

Leverage the teachings at Shrewd’m

Here is the part we’re proud of. The ideas on these pages — Buffett’s, Munger’s, Fisher’s and Schloss’s — are discussed every single day by a community whose depth genuinely isn’t found elsewhere. The Berkshire Hathaway board at Shrewd’m is the largest and longest-running gathering of value investors anywhere: a conversation that began on A.O.L., grew up at The Motley Fool, and now lives here. Among its members are former hedge-fund managers, career professionals and a striking number of genuinely accomplished private investors — some who have quietly built real fortunes — who are here simply for the love of the subject and the pleasure of passing on what they know.

That combination — serious calibre, plain old niceness, and real-world success, freely shared — is rare. It means a question you ask on a Tuesday evening can be answered by someone who has spent thirty years living the answer. If these pages have lit even a small spark, the best next step is to read a while among people who have been at it for decades. It costs nothing, the welcome is warm, and it is exactly the kind of company that makes a young investor — or an old one — a little more Shrewd every year.

— Manlobbi