My highlights from the book:

1. His talent sprang from his unrivaled independence of mind and ability to focus on his work and shut out the world, yet those same qualities exacted a toll.

2. Berkshire was a "job" to him in the sense that England was a job to Churchill.

3. He emerged from those first hard years with an absolute drive to become very, very rich. He thought about it before he was five years old. And from that time on, he scarcely stopped thinking of it.

4. Warren disgustedly reported that he knew more than the professors. His dissatisfaction-a forerunner of his general disaffection for business schools-was rooted in their mushy, overbroad approach. His professors had fancy theories but were ignorant of the practical details of making a profit that Warren craved.

5. His talent lay not in his range—which was narrowly focused on investing—but in his intensity. His entire soul was focused on that one outlet.

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6. Jack asked, "How do you do it?" Buffett said he read "a couple of thousand" financial statements a year.

7. This ability of Buffett's to cut through the clutter suggests a certain genius. Buffett focused so exquisitely on his object, and his simplicity was a counterpart to that genius. He recognized that layers of added executives—though each might be bright, earnest, well-intentioned, etc.—would blur his focus. Much of the "work" they might "accomplish" would be unnecessary work. (A Buffett aphorism: "That which is not worth doing is not worth doing well.")

8. It seemed too good to be true; if the stocks were so cheap, Buffett figured, somebody ought to be buying them. But slowly, it dawned on him. The somebody was him. Nobody was going to tell you that Western Insurance was a steal; you had to get there on your own.

9. What John D. Rockefeller, the oil cartelist, Andrew Carnegie, the philanthropic steel baron, Sam Walton, the humble retailer, and Bill Gates, the software nerd, have in common is that each owes his fortune to a single product or innovation.

10. As Buffett explained, Berkshire was something he intended never to sell. “I just like it. Berkshire is something that I would be in the rest of my life. It is public, but it is almost like the family business now.” Not long-term, but the rest of his life. His career-in a sense, his life-was subsumed in that one company. Everything he did, each investment, would add a stroke to that never-to-be-finished canvas. And no one could seize the brush from him.

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