Originally asked
Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017
Vox's fixed 9 Questions format asks this verbatim across respondents.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 24 June 2017 source ↗
Overthinking. I tend to conflate the amount of time spent on something with how good it is. Sometimes intuition is better than proof, and gut instinct better than hours of “work.”
Rushing to judgment. Looking for the bad in someone else before anything else.
Ironically, though, this is also the purchase in which I made my biggest mistake - of a kind, however, never recognized on financial statements. We paid $600 million in 1989 for Gillette preferred shares that were convertible into 48 million (split-adjusted) common shares. Taking an alternative route with the $600 million, I probably could have purchased 60 million shares of common from the company. The market on the common was then about $10.50, and given that this would have been a huge private placement carrying important restrictions, I probably could have bought the stock at a discount of at least 5%. I can't be sure about this, but it's likely that Gillette's management would have been just as happy to have Berkshire opt for common. But I was far too clever to do that.
I don’t believe anything is black and white, so I’m always searching for nuance. On the whole I think this is a positive thing, but it also means I almost never give an unqualified answer.
Fareed Zakaria, Winston Churchill, Celeste Ng, Eddie Glaude Jr., Charlie Munger, Sarah Perry
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