SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?

SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007

“Success is not a measure of what you get but what you give.”

Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, and a billionaire many times over, prefers to talk to young people who are attempting to figure out their life’s plan rather than rich people who want only to get richer.

“They are primarily interested in how I can improve their portfolio,” he confesses, “because they have this narrow sense of what success is or what it entails.”

This is how this kind man began to answer a student who asked the question how would he define success.

Mr. Buffet smiled that kindly grandfatherly smile of his, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story about what I consider success, and I think it might surprise you.”

The story he told was of a friend of his who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She was a little girl then, now in her seventies. She lost her parents and relatives in concentration camps in 1942, but managed to survive because others were willing at great risk to themselves to hide her.

“I have come to believe the absolute measure of success is simply that,” she told Mr. Buffet, “would someone be willing to hide you at great risk to themselves?”

It got the great philanthropist to ponder the question. He wondered, would my friends hide me? Would my family hide me? Would my children hide me if there were pressing danger and involve great personal risk to them?

This, for him, was the ultimate question. Would others show the compassion and caring, kindness and concern to shelter you from your enemies, from the terror that formed a ring of danger around you, from the hostile world that was collapsing in on you? They would be there, he concluded, when you had nowhere else to turn or to go, if you had been there for them in the conduct of your life.

Then he grew philosophical. To have a friend you must be a friend. To have others take risks and hide you, to consider you part of them and integral to them, there must be some semblance of behavior that exemplifies your life as complement to theirs.

Being successfully hidden at great risk to others would prove your inclusion in their community.

You cannot write a check for a $1 million and expect others to hide you.

You cannot intimate others to hide you when you have used race, religion, ethnicity, economics or politics to separate you from them.

They will hide you because you are part of them and they are part of you, and that is so because your life has been a textbook of caring, of doing for others what they cannot do for themselves, for showing kindness and understanding, tolerance and concern for others less fortunate who cannot seem to keep up, or who encounter misfortune through no fault of their own.

You have shown in your life that you are not separate from others, that you do not consider yourself better than others because you are richer or brighter, more accomplished or celebrated.

If that is the case, they will hide you. No success is greater than being hidden from your oppressors so that you can triumph another day.

Then he grew serious with his head bowed, and confessed that many still equate success with how much they have and not how much they can give of themselves to others.

They cheat and steal, bare false witness and lie to realize advantage over others, never dreaming of the day that they might need to be hidden from their enemies, enemies that chase and seek them out to crush and kill them, when their only crime had been being insensitive to the plight of other less fortunate.

Warren Buffet has willed the bulk of his multibillion dollar estate to the Bill & Kathy Gates Foundation, where he applauds the great work they are doing for others, work that he admits, he has not the organizational or delivery skills that they possess. A humble man, Warren Buffet is a humanitarian, who wears this badge quietly and unobtrusively. No question, he would be hidden.
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Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/.
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