Sublime

wealth is hard to accumulate and easy to lose.

He is both well liked and very intelligent. He is also very rich. I consider his annual “Chairman’s Letter” (in the Berkshire annual report) to be indispensable reading for anyone wanting to do well in business.

“Charlie was despairing over whether he would ever meet anyone else. ‘How can I find somebody? Out of twenty million people in California, half are women. Of these ten million, only two million are of an appropriate age. From that group, a million and a half would be married, leaving five hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand of them are too dum

“Try to be punctual in all your dealings. You will find it difficult to get along with some men, deal as little as possible with such.… Save your credit, for that is better than money.… If you go on in business, be content with moderate gains. Don’t be too hasty to get too rich.… I want you to live so as to be fit to live and fit to die.”

Convinced that the act of writing his diary had contributed to his performance, Soros joked that his profit represented the highest honorarium ever received by an author.32 When the diary was published two years later, as part of Soros’s book The Alchemy of Finance, reviewers mocked its dense prose. But as one commentator said, financial alchemy ce

If you go on in business, be content with moderate gains. Don’t be too hasty to get too rich.… I want you to live so as to be fit to live and fit to die.”5