I. Warren's Foundations & Early Formation

Warren Buffett’s early life is striking for how clearly his long-term temperament showed up before adulthood. Born in 1930 in Omaha during the Great Depression, he grew up acutely aware of financial instability. His father, Howard Buffett, was a stockbroker and later a congressman, so conversations about markets, business cycles, and investor emotions were part of his daily environment. His mother, Leila, enforced thrift and discipline, especially during years when the family struggled financially. That combination—exposure to markets paired with enforced frugality—formed the base of Buffett’s view of money: valuable, fragile, and governed by behavior more than luck.

From an early age, Buffett showed an almost unusual clarity about what interested him: numbers, business, and the mechanics of how money grows. But one of the most telling traits was his reading habit. He devoured the books in his father’s brokerage office and worked through every business, finance, and market book in the Omaha public library. He didn’t read casually. He read systematically. If a book referenced another source, he tracked that down too. By his early teens, he had absorbed a large portion of the available investment literature—not at a college level, but at an obsessive, curiosity-driven level. He was building a mental library long before he understood it would become his advantage.

This intellectual appetite worked alongside his real-world experiments. Buffett sold Coca-Cola door to door, ran a newspaper route as a mini-business (complete with expense tracking and optimization), and kept detailed ledgers of all income and spending. He loved the order and logic of accounting. He looked for patterns in margins and incentives even when he didn’t fully know the terminology. He filed his first tax return at age 14, claiming deductions for work equipment. These weren’t gimmicks—they reflected a naturally analytical mind drawn to structure and clarity.

The lesson that shaped him most came at age 11, when he bought and quickly sold his first stock, Cities Service Preferred. The price dropped and recovered slightly, and he sold out of fear. Then the stock soared. Buffett internalized something profound: impatience destroys returns. Markets fluctuate, but value doesn’t move at the speed of quotes. That realization guided him for the rest of his life.

During his teenage years, his experiments became more sophisticated. The pinball business he started with a friend wasn’t a hustle—it was an early exercise in capital allocation. They bought one machine, reinvested profits to buy more, scaled cautiously, and sold the business at a profit when returns began to flatten. Buffett acted less like a kid with a side project and more like someone who instinctively understood compounding and deployment of capital.

The most important turning point before adulthood arrived at age 19 when he discovered The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Buffett had already read almost everything publicly available about business, but Graham’s book gave structure to ideas he had been circling intuitively: intrinsic value, margin of safety, emotional discipline, and viewing stocks as pieces of real businesses. The book changed him instantly. He applied to Columbia just to learn directly from Graham—an early demonstration of his willingness to go straight to the best possible teacher.

Buffett’s foundation—formed entirely before age 20—was not about talent or genius. It was about the behaviors and habits he built early:

• reading relentlessly to build a mental framework

• learning from small failures without emotional volatility

• treating money as something to steward, not spend

• keeping meticulous records and loving the clarity of accounting

• reinvesting instead of consuming

• seeking competence before opportunity

• and recognizing the power of patience long before he had real capital

Everything that came later—the partnership, Berkshire Hathaway, the investments—grew from these early habits. Buffett didn’t stumble into his philosophy as an adult. He built it step by step as a child, teenager, and young man through reading, observation, discipline, and repetition.