Great BusinessWeek article “What I Learned from My Dad – When his youngest son decided to become a musician, Buffett offered moral but not financial support“. Here is an excerpt (emphasis added),
One of my father’s often-quoted tenets is that a parent, if he has the means to do so, should give his children “enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.” A head start is fine; a free pass is often a crippling disservice. When I turned 19, I received my inheritance—proceeds from the sale of a farm, which my father converted into Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) stock. At the time I received them, the shares were worth roughly $90,000. It was understood that I should expect nothing more.
So—what to do with the money? I was a student at Stanford University; there were no strings attached. Fortunately, I’d had the advantage of seeing my older siblings burn through most of their cash; I didn’t want to follow down that path. At the other extreme, I might have done absolutely nothing with that stock—just left it in an account and forgotten about it. If I’d picked that option, my shares would now be worth around $72 million. But I didn’t make that choice, and I don’t regret it for a second. People think I’m either lying or crazy when I say this, but it happens to be true, because I used my nest egg to buy something more valuable than money: I used it to buy time. [Kempton: Time is the greatest equalizer in life. No one, absolutely no one can buy time lost or buy more time.]
It has not lost on me how Mr. Li Ka-Shing, the richest man in HK, had decided to bring up his two sons (see this biography).
Filed under: investment, Love, people, united states, Warren Buffett, World 
