Warren Buffett is worth $147B — by reading what nobody else would

Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes

Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

When Will Shortz was thirteen, a teacher asked the class to write a paper about the job they wanted when they grew up.

Will wrote that he would make puzzles for a living.

At fourteen he sold his first puzzle, to a children's magazine.

Then high school came, and the dream started to look silly.

Nobody he knew made puzzles for a living.
There was no college degree in it, no company hiring puzzle makers, no adult he had ever met who did it.

Then his mother found a program at Indiana University that let a student invent their own degree.

If the university did not teach the subject you wanted, you could write your own list of courses, and find professors willing to teach them.

So Will wrote one for puzzles.

He called his subject enigmatology, from the Greek word for riddle.

In his own words: "This had been my dream, and now I found I could do it."

He graduated in 1974.

To this day, he is the only person who has ever held that degree.

Turns out there was no degree in puzzles because nobody else wanted one.

And that turned out to be his biggest advantage.
Nobody else wanted to be a puzzle expert, so he had no competition.
When a magazine or a newspaper needed one, there was only one person to call.

Then in 1993, the New York Times made him its crossword editor, the person who picks and polishes every crossword the paper prints.

He has held that job for more than thirty years.

Will spent his life on the one thing everyone around him thought was boring,
but he loved it.

Will built a whole career on puzzles, a hobby everyone around him thought was a waste of time.

This week, we sit down on a Saturday morning to finally plan our YouTube channel.

We write down five topics, and every one of them is a subject we would have to go and learn from scratch.

The hobby we already know inside out, the one we spend every free evening on, never even makes the list.

We think it is too ordinary, and that nobody would watch a video about it.

So we never record the first video, and the list of topics just keeps getting longer.

Will would say we have it backwards,
the hobby that feels easy to us and boring to everyone else is exactly the one we should build on.

There is a one-sentence test for finding that hobby.

A twenty-one-year-old stockbroker passed it by reading twenty thousand pages that bored everyone else.

It made him one of the richest people alive, so meet Warren.

In 1951, Warren Buffett was twenty-one, and he had just been turned down for the only job he wanted.

So he went home to Omaha, Nebraska, and took a job at his father's small firm, selling stocks.

Every firm like his father's kept a set of books on the shelf called the Moody's manuals.

Nobody read these books from cover to cover.

They were like a phone book.
When a customer asked about one company, the stockbroker looked up that one page, read it, and put the book back on the shelf.

But Warren read the whole set.
Every page, from the first company to the last.

When he reached the last page, he went back to page one and read the whole set a second time.

In his own words: "I probably went through 20,000 pages in the Moody's industrial, transportation, banks and finance manuals.
And I did it twice."

Why read every page, when everyone else looked up one company at a time?

Because those books listed every single company you could buy shares in.
Not most of them.
All of them.

The only way to find the good ones was to look at all of them.
Nobody was going to call him up and tell him which company was a bargain.
He had to find them himself.

Get this — deep in the banking volume, he found a small insurance company he had never heard of.
It was in Fort Scott, Kansas.

The shares were unbelievably cheap.

Think of it this way.
Say one share cost $10.
Every year, the company made $10 in profit for each share.
So in one year, your share had earned back every dollar you paid for it.
There was one problem.
The company was so small and so unknown that its shares were hard to find.
Only a few hundred people in Fort Scott owned any.

So Warren ran ads in the local Fort Scott newspaper, asking those people to sell him their shares.

Then he put half of all the money he had into the company.

Warren calls the 1950s his best decade as an investor.
He says his money grew by more than fifty percent a year in those years.

Why so much?
Because bargains like that insurance company were all over those books, waiting for anyone willing to read every page and he found them.

Warren read all twenty thousand pages, twice.
Nobody made him do it.
He did it because he enjoyed it, and he was curious about what was on the next page.

The work that bores everyone else never bored him.
That is exactly why he found what they missed.

He still says he tap-dances to work every morning.

➡️ Easy for You, Hard for Them

Will spent years studying puzzles, a subject so dull to everyone else that no college even offered a degree in it.
To him it was the most fun thing in the world, so he wrote his own degree and built a career on it.

Warren read twenty thousand pages of company numbers, twice, a job so boring that every other broker opened those books only when forced to.
To him it was a treasure hunt, and it made him rich.

Paul Graham sold his company Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 for more than $48 million.
Later he started Y Combinator, which puts money into brand-new startups and coaches them.

He wrote about this in a 2015 essay.

In it, he gave a one-line test for finding the work you are built for.

"If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for."

This move is called Easy for You, Hard for Them.

Neither of them was suffering through the work.

They both found a hobby that felt like play to them, even though everyone else found it boring.
Then they built their careers on that hobby.

So the next time you sit down to decide what your YouTube channel is about,
skip the impressive topic you would have to spend a year learning.

Pick the thing you already do on a free evening without anyone asking you to.
The hard part, learning the subject, is already done.

Build on the thing that bores everyone but you.

That's it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!

Yours 'helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business' Vijay Peduru 🦸‍♂️

The prompt below finds the thing you do easily that tires everyone else out.
You just tell it how you really spend your time.