First, a dream...

I have always thought that one should have a dream or aspiration in order to organize your life, to motivate yourself to become a better version of yourself. Without dreams or aspiration, life is a dreary journey that you just live through. This is why most people, when reflecting back on their life, think of how good the old times were. They were not living life forward, they were living backwards.

So here I am, survivor of Earth for 30 years, had the audacity to dream that I will be financially independent 10 years from now. It's got to take a lot of hardwork and courage to achieve my dream but it will all be worth it. And how do I go about achieving it? Investing, specifically investing in businesses.

My first road map - The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the business of life.

I find the book very riveting, and was instantly hooked. The most intesting part about the book for me is about his early investing life, between 20 - 30 of his age, where his brilliance start to shine. He started with $10,000 of his own money earned from being newspaper boy and some business ventures with his chums. After being rejected by Harvard University for a graduate program, he fortuitously met Benjamin Graham through the infamous book "The Intelligent Investor" and found out that he taught at Columbia University. Buffett then immediately enrolled and studied under the dean of Wall Street. Eventually, Buffett went to work for Graham for 3 years and his net worth, during the short 3 years grew more than 10 times to about $150,000 if my memory serves me. That is why he always said "I killed the Dow during the 50's". After 3 years, Graham eventually wind down the fund and wanted to appoint Buffett, at that time 26, to become the general partner. Buffett did not accept the appointment and went back Omaha. Figuring that he had nothing else to do, and not willing to work for anyone other than Graham, he formed his legendary Buffett Partnership with other family members, with starting capital of $105,100, with the $100 coming from Buffett. Thence, he went on to achieve one of his best performance in history, compounding 31.6% compared to Dow 9.1% from 1956 - 1970, when he wind down his fund because he ran out of ideas, as the market had become more and more euphoric.

Well, that was a short summary of what happened to Buffett during his early years, and I treat it as a molding board where I would attempt to emulate. It is from that book, which became the genesis of my learning about investing. It was a fruitful journey, as I am one who has a intense passion for reading and learning, especially the finance and business genre. But, as Buffett's partner Charlie Munger said: In doing anything complex, one will need a partner to talk to. This blog serves that purpose of talking to readers of my blog and to consolidate my thoughts and lea rnings so that I might synthsize new knowledge from it.

In the upcoming posts, I will be talking more about investing, the framework to think about investment, and more investing book reviews. Stay tuned!

Cordially,

Wei Heng