The more you learn, the more you earn.
Warren Buffett
The meaning of the quote
In 2000, an MBA student named Todd Combs sat in an investing class at Columbia Business School and watched a guest speaker walk in carrying a stack of trade reports. Someone asked the visitor how to prepare for a career picking stocks. He held up the stack and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day.” Then he explained that knowledge builds up the same way compound interest does, and warned the room that few of them would keep it up. The speaker was Warren Buffett.
Combs kept it up. He read hundreds, then as many as 1,000 pages a day for years, first running his own hedge fund and later joining Berkshire Hathaway as one of Buffett’s investment managers.
That classroom story is the clearest record of the idea behind this quote, though the line itself has traveled further than any single speech. Buffett has repeated the same message for decades in different words. In a Forbes interview, he called self-improvement “the one investment that supersedes all others,” because no crash, tax bill, or bad year can take a skill away once you’ve earned it. No dated transcript ties him to this exact sentence the way the Columbia story does. It reads more like a distillation of that lifelong theme than a single quotable moment, and similar lines show up in other authors’ work too. What holds up, wherever the wording started, is the habit behind it.
Money left in an account earns interest, and that interest earns its own interest the following year. Skills work the same way. An hour spent learning to read a spreadsheet, weld a joint, or write a clean sentence sits there and pays out again every time you use it, and the payout grows the longer you keep adding to it. Someone who reads about their trade for twenty minutes a day for ten years has put in around 1,200 hours, close to a part-time degree, without ever taking a day off work to get it.
A mechanic who spends Saturday mornings studying a new hybrid engine’s wiring diagrams isn’t just filling a weekend. Within a couple of years, she’s the only person in the shop who can take that job, and the shop pays for it. A nurse who reads one new drug protocol a week outlasts the colleague who stopped learning the day they passed their boards. Neither of them needed a raise to arrive first. They needed to become the person a raise gets handed to.
Try this
- Pick one subject tied to your work, or a skill
Any work r skill you’ve keep meaning to build, spend twenty minutes reading or watching real material on it, not opinions about it, five days this week. - Don’t treat 500 pages a day as a target.
Treat it as a reminder that Buffett’s edge over other investors was time spent, not talent handed to him at birth. He still reads for most of his working day.
The 500 pages Buffett held up in that Columbia classroom in 2000 are still sitting on somebody’s desk right now, unread. The only difference between that person and Todd Combs is what happens next.
About the author
Warren Buffett used to get physically sick before he had to speak in public. He arranged his college class schedule around avoiding it. At 20, he signed up for a Dale Carnegie public speaking course in New York and wrote a check to cover it. Before the first class met, he cancelled the check. “I just couldn’t do it,” he said later. “I was that terrified.”
A year or two after finishing college, working as a securities salesman back in Omaha, he tried again. This time he handed the instructor $100 in cash instead of a check. “I knew if I gave him the cash I’d show up,” he recalled in The Snowball. He showed up, sat in a room of 30 other people who, he said, all had trouble saying their own names, and by the fourth or fifth week of the course, he proposed to Susan Thompson.
“In my office, you will not see the degree that I got from the University of Nebraska. You will not see the master’s degree I got from Columbia University. But you will see the award certificate I got from the Dale Carnegie Course.”
Harvard Business School turned him down after college. He found Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor instead, a book he later called the best one ever written on investing, and enrolled at Columbia Business School to study under Graham directly. He worked briefly at Graham’s investment firm, then went home to Omaha, where in 1965 he took control of a failing textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway. He turned it into the holding company that made him famous as the “Oracle of Omaha.”
Buffett still runs most of his day the way he told that Columbia classroom to run theirs: reading, mostly annual reports, trade publications, and newspapers. The same man who once threw up at the thought of speaking to a room now stands in front of roughly 40,000 shareholders every spring at Berkshire’s annual meeting and takes their questions for hours at a time.
Resources
- Berkshire star followed Warren Buffett’s advice: Read 500 pages a day (CNBC)
- Warren Buffett says this one investment ‘supersedes all others’ (CNBC)
- Introvert Warren Buffett Was ‘Terrified’ of Public Speaking (Entrepreneur)
- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Book, by Alice Schroeder)
- The Intelligent Investor (Book, by Benjamin Graham)
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