I love showing up to the office every day, drinking gourmet coffee, wearing a diamond-studded watch, and pouring over hundreds of pages of financial statements searching for hidden gems that have gone unnoticed by Wall Street. The rest of the time, I focus on growing my family’s collection of operating businesses selling everything from custom letterman jackets to wedding favors, which serve as the cash generators to grow our ever-expanding stock holdings. This formula, which I wrote about in an article discussing the Berkshire Hathaway model, works whether you are a janitor or a United States Senator. The thing is, if my passion were coding computer games or gardening roses, you can bet that I’d be doing, even if that meant giving up the art collection.
Wealth and success are not just measured in dollars. Instead, you should measure your happiness by the percentage of your day that you are able to spend doing the things you love, with the luxuries that you desire. It is madness to spend ten or twenty years working at a job you despise so you have more time to fish and read books when you could have simply worked part time and had both of those things. That’s not a cliché. It’s the truth. Most people are brainwashed from birth and never actually learn that lesson which is why they are so frustrated.
As you study the site, learning how to calculate financial ratios or analyze the balance sheet or income statement, always remember that vital truth. Your portfolio exists to service you and your dreams.
