|
There’s a great story
about an efficiency expert that once concluded his lecture with the
comment, "Please don’t try these techniques at home." "Why not?" he was
asked.
"I used to watch my wife
prepare breakfast and wondered why she made so many trips to the table
carrying only one item at a time," he replied. "One day I asked her,
‘Wouldn’t it be quicker and more efficient if you organized yourself to
carry several things to the table at once?’"
"Did it work?" he was
asked.
"Oh, yes, it worked,"
the expert replied. "It used to take my wife twenty minutes to prepare
breakfast. Now I do it in seven."
Not all advice is
appreciated. And sometimes it is not heard the way it was intended.
There is some pretty good advice, five suggestions, from one of the
richest people in the United States, offered to 380 high school students
in Omaha, Nebraska. Do you recognize anything in what multi-billionaire
Warren Buffett told his audience?
1. Avoid credit cards.
If you are going to make progress, you will not do it by borrowing at 18
to 20 percent interest. |
2. Develop integrity,
which guides intelligence and energy. Buffett said he looks for these
three qualities in hiring people. "If they don’t have the first one,
integrity, the other two will kill you."
3. Establish good
habits, picking people to admire and following their example, while
learning to weed out attributes that are not admirable. "If you do
that," he admonished, "two or three years from now you’ll find out the
person you admire most will be yourself."
4. Learn about companies
before investing in them; do not rely on someone else’s advice.
5. Choose professions
for love of the work, not money.
While Buffet talks about
credit cards, interest, investments and professions, does anything in
his advice conflict with the 4-Way Test? In fact, applying Occam’s Razor
could produce the 4-Way Test. Hmmm. Not bad advice.
Doug Rudman |
