The Snowball: Let Compounding Do The Work

Alice Schroeder's book, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life was one of manoooomy books I read as I was educating myself on financial literacy in the hopes of becoming a teacher.

As a reminder, I'd spent the first half of my career working as a trading floor summarized by finance bros. Before that, I went to London for a couple of months for a participate in Citi's Global Markets Training Program, before that I got my MFA specializing in Finance from NYU. So, at that point, I felt fairly comfortable with the finance stuff.

But I'd never learned a thing about financial literacy.

Schroeder's portrait reframed the game for me.

Notes I wrote to myself

 Is Buffett a genius? Yes.

But there is also a simple, overlooked truth about his fortune.

Most of his wealth (like, 99% of it) has shown up after many quiet years (decades) of compounding.

His lessons are as old as he is

- Find your circle of competence
- Patience over speed/timing
- Character is a strategy (work with partners you can trust)
- Stay the course through boredom, unnecessary wants and reckless headlines

Back then, when I was reading 100 finance books a year, I was searching for an answer to what better life that most important question I had about my business.

Who should I target? Who should I teach?

And the lessons I learned in this book specifically guided me to the answer.

Students and young professionals.

Why?

Because the edge is time.

The absolute best thing I can do for my students is to start them early.

With plain English lessons.

With low-cost strategies.

With habits that survive bad days, months, years and decades.

So they can ignore the noise. And just begin.

Speaking about this very topic -
Two of my favorite people/resources together on the same podcast (3 hrs)