Nano Book Review: "The Snowball"

On the perils of meeting your heroes.

Nano book reviews are where I attempt to review an interesting book in around 500 words or so. The last time I did this (two years ago to the day — wow) was The Least of Us by Sam Quinones.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life is Alice Schroeder’s 2009 chronicle of Warren Buffett’s life and business career from his beginnings as a paper boy through the initiation of the ‘07-’08 Financial Crisis. Along the way he assumes control of Berkshire Hathaway and becomes America’s richest and most respected business authority. His investing principles — specifically value investing, the miracle of compounding, and his decentralized management philosophy — have had a defining influence on multiple generations of investors.

One reason I was interested in reading The Snowball is the fact that the book’s publication led to a significant fracturing in the relationship between Schroeder and Buffett (who had been longtime friends and collaborators). This was a hint that the book might be more revealing than your typical business hagiography. And indeed, Schroeder’s portrait of Buffett is quite mixed.

As for how he runs his business affairs, Buffett comes off extremely impressively. He is long-term oriented, epistemically humble, trusting of his managers (perhaps to a fault), flexible and adaptable, patient yet aggressive, and above all else preoccupied with establishing (and sharing) the philosophies and methodologies of investing so that other people can carry Berkshire’s torch without his active involvement. In many ways he comes off as an ideal boss, or at least the ideal chairman of your board.

It’s outside of his business dealings where things start to get murky. Buffett’s personal psychology is deeply, almost tragically avoidant. He deprioritizes his family and only seems to be able to make friends with people who can relate to him on the topics of business and money. His eating habits are so remedial that he unavoidably insults the host of whichever dinner party he’s at (at one point I yelled out loud, “will you please just eat the fucking sushi, Warren?”). When life makes demands of him — for example, to give a speech at his best friend’s funeral, or to fire an underperforming CEO — he almost always delays or finds a reason to cancel. The section about his decision to not attend his own wife’s memorial service due to anxiety was heartbreaking and (to be perfectly honest) unbelievably disappointing.

Aspects of Buffett’s personality that superficially appear as endearing quirks — like the fact that he spends the entirety of his waking life sitting at his desk reading annual reports, or how he plays bridge on his computer for 3-5 hours a night — begin to look like the defense mechanisms of someone in full-on retreat from the world. And Berkshire Hathaway effectively becomes a Rube Goldberg device for the purpose of distancing Buffett from his own emotional life. The reader begins to wonder: Does this man have an amazing life, or a wasted one?

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Mark 8:36

Ultimately The Snowball is a book about courage and its contradictions. Here we have a person who is so uniquely capable of “being greedy when others are fearful,” yet who runs from nearly every opportunity to do the same in his personal life. These inconsistencies force me to ask myself: If I had to choose between being an amazing investor and being a great husband/father/friend, which would I choose? In what ways am I already making that choice in how I spend my time and attention right now?

Overall I liked this book a lot. While I wouldn’t recommend it as an investing guidebook (there are more efficient ways than a 700+ page book to get at Buffett’s investing philosophy), as a thought-provoking biography of the complicated but essential man in the center of so much American business history, I give it high marks.