Warren Buffett: The career advice 'I told my own kids' from an 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson essay

Like many people, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett followed a parent’s career path: His father owned a stock brokerage firm before later embarking on a political career.

Needless to say, the younger Buffett stuck with investing and did quite well. When he stepped down as CEO at the end of last year, Berkshire Hathaway was worth more than $1 trillion. But crucially, Buffett said, he didn’t receive any parental pressure to follow that path.

“He said that — which was very important — he had no feeling that I should follow in his footsteps. Period,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in “Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy.”

On the contrary, Buffett recalled his dad paraphrasing a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance“: “The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

In other words, you have to find your own calling. It’s advice Buffett said he passed down to the next generation of his family.

“I told my own kids … look for the job you’d take if you didn’t need a job,” Buffet said. “And that’s basically what my dad was telling me.”

Buffett has frequently said that he latched onto his lifelong fascination with making money at an early age.

“I found the answer when I was five,” said Buffett, who spent his youth selling gum and delivering newspapers, among other enterprises. He bought his first stock at age 11. “And it was just interesting to me — way more interesting to me than it was to my dad.”

For people who need to graduate from kindergarten before finding their raison d’etre, finding the kind of job you’d do without a paycheck may require some trial and error — along with taking some jobs just to survive, Buffett said.   

“Economic realities, I acknowledge, may interfere with that kind of search,” he wrote in his 2021 letter to shareholders. “Even so, I urge the students never to give up the quest, for when they find that sort of job, they will no longer be ‘working.'”

One good bet, Buffett has said, is to gravitate toward high-quality people you love to work with.

“Who you associate with is just enormously important,” he said at the annual meeting of Berkshire shareholders in May. “Don’t expect that you’ll make every decision right on that, but you are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends.”

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