The screenwriter William Goldman once said Hollywood films do one of two things: They tell us something we already knew, or something we want to believe is true.
So it goes with graduation day speeches: The sky's the limit! You've got your whole life ahead of you! No speaker ever says: "Listen up: Middle management in sales. Think about it."
Still, there is an outside chance that our newly-minted college grads are listening to their commencement day speakers. It's a horrifying prospect.
Picture what it might be like to be, say, a 22-year-old Warren Buffett sitting through President Obama's big commencement speech last week.
Obama's Arizona State speech was full of denunciations of "greed and irresponsibility" and pleas that the young graduates avoid mere profit-taking in favor of pursuing gauzy dreams about the betterment of personkind.
He cautioned against the "formulas for success that have been pedaled so frequently," then confused this supposedly easy formula with its results, castigating those who worry about "this 'who's who' list or that top 100 list," or "how big your corner office is." He cautioned against "a ruthless competition pursued only on your own behalf."
He told the Class of 2009 to "give back and contribute to the life of your community and your nation," briefly suggesting that it was okay to start companies but steering them to "teach in a high-need school" or get to work "registering voters," "tutoring children" or leading "a green revolution." "Help our struggling non-profits find better, more effective ways to serve folks in need," the president urged.
Warren Buffett went into the non-non-profit sector. True, he wasn't much interested in the size of his corner office, but he made money for an even more trivial reason: for its own sake.
He is, as his biographer Alice Schroeder puts it, "a collector" -- a born pack rat who as a boy hoarded coins, stamps, bottle caps, license plate numbers. He spent his life nurturing and caring for his own money mountain.
He didn't pick his greatest investments -- like Gillette and Coca-Cola -- because they heal the sick or educate the poor. Nobody needs sugar water. Coke doesn't make the world more groovy and Obama-ish. Its product is virtually indistinguishable from that of its competitors. Buffett doesn't care. He likes Coke. It's a well-run company that made him money.
Buffett can be ruthlessly funny about his ruthlessness. He noted in 1999 that "zero money" had been made from the total of all airline stock investments in history. "I really like to think," he said, "that if I had been down there at Kitty Hawk, I would have been far-sighted enough and public-spirited enough to have shot Orville down. I owed it to future capitalists."
One of Buffett's first big scores was a financial company called National American, run by a guy named Howard Ahmanson. Buffett admired him, as Schroeder writes in her biography, "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," because, Buffett said, "formerly a lot of people came in to [Howard's bank] and paid their mortgages in person. Howard put the mortgage at the farthest branch away from where you lived so that you paid by mail and didn't spend half an hour of one of his guys' time telling them about your kids. Everybody else had been to see 'It's a Wonderful Life' and felt that you should do this Jimmy Stewart stuff, but Howard didn't want to see his customers. His operating costs were way under anybody else's."
If a 22-year-old Buffett had been moved by Obama's words as an ASU graduate, what would he have done? Maybe he would have joined Teach for America. Maybe he would have enlisted in the Peace Corps so he could have promoted HIV awareness in Malawi. Maybe he would have become a community organizer. Or a law professor.
Instead, like Andrew Carnegie, like John D. Rockefeller, like Bill Gates -- those hated monopolists -- he pursued his own interests and made more than he could ever spend, to the world's great benefit. Buffett put capitalism before community. Do you agree, Africa? Before you answer, who would you rather have on your side: 22-year-old Warren Buffett teaching English in a hut, or 78-year-old Warren Buffett, sending gargantuan checks?
Kyle Smith, NY Post, May 17, 2009
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