The investing Icon: Mr Warren Buffett

Some refined personalities just sweep you off your feet; you simply tend to admire and idolize them. Their overwhelming humbleness and modesty makes you understand why! You try to incorporate their thoughts and apply them in your real life situations. I have read quite a few articles on one such man, Mr Warren Buffet. His intellect engulfed me, inspired me in lot many ways, and immediately made me his ardent fan!

Warren Buffett may be amongst the world's richest men, but they say you wouldn't know it if you met him. He wants to be liked far more than he wants to be famous, and his sense of humour is far more indicative of his personality than his ego. Even today, being the most successful investors in the world, it is not uncommon for him to take a visitor to McDonald's on the way to the airport. 

He articulates practical investment strategies, the base of which greatly rely on ‘Investing in Yourself and making your life your greatest asset’. Then of course, there is a part of Buffett's appeal; his charm and charisma that he brings to the normally pretentious world of finance. His magnetic aura makes you realize that it is important to keep life simple, not easy!

Here, I thought of sharing some of my favourite quotes from one of the greatest investing legends of our time:

1. A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.
2. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
3. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
4. Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
5. Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
6. I don't look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.
7. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
8. Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
9. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.
10. In the business world, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.
11. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.

12. Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; PROFIT from folly rather than participate in it.

13. Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

14. The rich invest in time, the poor in money

15. I never attempt to make money on the stock market, I buy on assumption they could close the market the next day and not re-open it for 5 years…

16. If past history was all that was needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.

17. We should enjoy the process, far more than the proceeds.

18. I have no idea on timing. It is easier to tell WHAT will happen than WHEN it will happen.

19. Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline do you get rational behaviour.

20. You only have to do a few things right in your life, so long as you don’t do more things wrong.

As a novice in investing, these simple postulates (and I call them so, because they come from a legend) made a lot of sense to me, and I hope they do the same to you!