This time of year, many thousands of young people stride onto the
commencement stage and take their diplomas—and, with the other hand,
turn in their library cards. Okay, not literally. And I’m sure most
graduates don’t stop checking books out of libraries or downloading them
on their Kindles. But many still have the impression that college is
the time in our lives when we devote ourselves to serious learning, and
that after we walk off the stage, it’s time to start the doing. This notion is hopelessly outdated.
In today’s innovation-obsessed economy, almost everyone has to be a thinker as well as a doer. All of us—recent grads and proud old alums—have to keep on learning to come up with better ideas about how to improve a product, service, or process.
Because they are thinkers as well as doers, the best idea people understand that intellectual curiosity is not irrelevant to business success. They would agree with Warren Buffett, who believes—as his business partner Charlie Munger relates—that “it’s very hard to succeed in something unless you take the first step—which is to become very interested in it.”
In a professional context, intellectual curiosity is basically an abiding interest in any and all matters that could improve the job you’re doing. It leads to the kind of learning that is not episodic. It’s constant. It’s what Buffett does.
He is acclaimed as the richest super-investor in the world, but is perhaps less known as someone dedicated to the proposition that learning never ends. There’s a simple reason why he seeks out knowledge every day: he knows of no other strategy for remarkable success. “If Warren had stopped learning early on, his record would be a shadow of what it’s been,” Munger said in a commencement address five years ago at the University of Southern California’s law school.
Intellectual Seriousness
Buffett’s intellectual bent is revealed in his whole way of investing. He came up at a time when most investors practiced a version of voodoo economics, playing the market much as they would a Ouija board or a slot machine. (Some might say that for many investors today, old habits have been difficult to break, in this respect.) Learning from his mentor, Benjamin Graham of Columbia University, Buffett fixed his attention not just on the waxing and waning of a company’s stock, but primarily on its deeper value, as indicated by such measures as earnings and assets.
Searching for the “intrinsic value” of a company, Buffett would conduct research of a kind few others did on their own, often heading down in person to Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s during his early days in New York. Buffett later recalled, “I was the only one who ever showed up at those places. They never asked if I was a customer. I would get these files that dated back forty or fifty years. They didn’t have copy machines, so I’d sit there and scribble all these little notes, this figure and that figure.”
He also looked for ideas and market clues in conventional ways, like reading annual reports and the Wall Street Journal, but often with a splash of difference. In the 1980s, in Omaha, he went so far as to strike a special deal with the local distributor of the Journal, as Alice Schroeder reports in her riveting biography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. “When batches of the Journal arrived in Omaha every night, a copy was pulled out and placed in his driveway before midnight. He sat up waiting to read tomorrow’s news before everybody else got to see it,” she writes.
Long after walking off the commencement stage, Buffett is still hitting the books—and the newspapers and the reports and many other sources of potential insight. He devotes as much time to thinking and learning as he does to doing. (With just a little exaggeration, Munger notes that Buffett spends about half his time sitting and reading and the other half talking to people who might have some good ideas to offer.)
This isn’t just about book learning. We have to be ready to learn while doing. Basically, this means understanding that there are not one but two products of the work we do. The first is the actual thing we make or the service we provide or the process we manage. The second product, no less essential, is what we learn along the way. It’s the ideas we get about how to do better.
Whether the learning is on or off the job, professional life today requires a level of intellectual seriousness that many of us still don’t associate with day-to-day business performance. And there’s a lesson for 2012 graduates: Hold on to that library card!
by By Andy Boynton, with William Bole.
In today’s innovation-obsessed economy, almost everyone has to be a thinker as well as a doer. All of us—recent grads and proud old alums—have to keep on learning to come up with better ideas about how to improve a product, service, or process.
Because they are thinkers as well as doers, the best idea people understand that intellectual curiosity is not irrelevant to business success. They would agree with Warren Buffett, who believes—as his business partner Charlie Munger relates—that “it’s very hard to succeed in something unless you take the first step—which is to become very interested in it.”
In a professional context, intellectual curiosity is basically an abiding interest in any and all matters that could improve the job you’re doing. It leads to the kind of learning that is not episodic. It’s constant. It’s what Buffett does.
He is acclaimed as the richest super-investor in the world, but is perhaps less known as someone dedicated to the proposition that learning never ends. There’s a simple reason why he seeks out knowledge every day: he knows of no other strategy for remarkable success. “If Warren had stopped learning early on, his record would be a shadow of what it’s been,” Munger said in a commencement address five years ago at the University of Southern California’s law school.
Intellectual Seriousness
Buffett’s intellectual bent is revealed in his whole way of investing. He came up at a time when most investors practiced a version of voodoo economics, playing the market much as they would a Ouija board or a slot machine. (Some might say that for many investors today, old habits have been difficult to break, in this respect.) Learning from his mentor, Benjamin Graham of Columbia University, Buffett fixed his attention not just on the waxing and waning of a company’s stock, but primarily on its deeper value, as indicated by such measures as earnings and assets.
Searching for the “intrinsic value” of a company, Buffett would conduct research of a kind few others did on their own, often heading down in person to Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s during his early days in New York. Buffett later recalled, “I was the only one who ever showed up at those places. They never asked if I was a customer. I would get these files that dated back forty or fifty years. They didn’t have copy machines, so I’d sit there and scribble all these little notes, this figure and that figure.”
He also looked for ideas and market clues in conventional ways, like reading annual reports and the Wall Street Journal, but often with a splash of difference. In the 1980s, in Omaha, he went so far as to strike a special deal with the local distributor of the Journal, as Alice Schroeder reports in her riveting biography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. “When batches of the Journal arrived in Omaha every night, a copy was pulled out and placed in his driveway before midnight. He sat up waiting to read tomorrow’s news before everybody else got to see it,” she writes.
Long after walking off the commencement stage, Buffett is still hitting the books—and the newspapers and the reports and many other sources of potential insight. He devotes as much time to thinking and learning as he does to doing. (With just a little exaggeration, Munger notes that Buffett spends about half his time sitting and reading and the other half talking to people who might have some good ideas to offer.)
This isn’t just about book learning. We have to be ready to learn while doing. Basically, this means understanding that there are not one but two products of the work we do. The first is the actual thing we make or the service we provide or the process we manage. The second product, no less essential, is what we learn along the way. It’s the ideas we get about how to do better.
Whether the learning is on or off the job, professional life today requires a level of intellectual seriousness that many of us still don’t associate with day-to-day business performance. And there’s a lesson for 2012 graduates: Hold on to that library card!
by By Andy Boynton, with William Bole.
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