这段来自于巴菲特98年给MBA的一次交流，这里把他说margin的一段放进来，说得非常透彻。关于做自己喜欢的事情那段我也很喜欢。
Warren Buffett
Lecture at the University of Florida School of Business
October 15, 1998
This speech was the first in a series sponsored by the Graham-Buffett Teaching Endowment, established in 1997 by a $1 million gift from (1970 UF graduate) Mason Hawkins.
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Question: You were rumored to be one of the rescue buyers of Long Term Capital, what was the play there, what did you see?
巴菲特：以鲁珀特·默多克为封面的《财富》杂志。它讲述了我们参与的整个故事；这是一个有趣的故事。周五下午，我接到一个关于 LTCM 的非常严肃的电话，说事情变得严重了。我认识这些人，他们中的大多数人都非常了解——当我在那里时，他们中的大多数人都在所罗门。这个地方正在崩溃，那个周末美联储正在派人上场。在那个星期五和下一个星期三之间。实际上，纽约联储策划了一场救援行动，但没有涉及任何联邦资金。我很活跃，但我很难接触到任何人。
我们在星期三早上出价。我在纽约联储与比尔麦克多诺谈过。我们为净资产出价 2.5 亿，但我们会在此基础上投入 3 和 3/4 亿。伯克希尔 30 亿美元，7 亿美元。来自 AIG 和 3 亿美元。来自高盛。我们提交了该文件，但我们对此设置了非常短的时间限制，因为当您竞标价值 1000 亿美元的流通证券时，您不希望将固定价格竞标留在那里很长时间。
最终银行家们达成了交易，但那是一段有趣的时期。整个 LTCM 真的很吸引人，因为如果你把拉里·希伦布兰德、埃里克·罗森菲尔德、约翰·梅里韦瑟和两位诺贝尔奖获得者放在一起的话。如果你把他们中的 16 个人计算在内，他们的智商大约与在该国一个企业（包括微软）一起工作的任何 16 个人一样高。一个房间里的智慧令人难以置信。现在你把它与这些人在他们所从事的领域拥有丰富经验的事实结合起来。这些人不是一群靠卖男装赚钱然后突然进入证券行业的人。他们总共有 16 个，他们有 300 或 400 年的经验，完全按照他们正在做的事情去做，然后你加上第三个因素，即他们中的大多数人在企业中拥有大部分非常可观的净资产。他们自己的钱数以亿计（处于危险之中），超高的智力并在他们所知道的领域工作。基本上他们破产了。这对我来说绝对是迷人的。
如果我写一本书，它会被称为，为什么聪明的人做愚蠢的事情。我的搭档说应该是自传（70年代芒格因为用margin遇到过巨大的麻烦）但这可能是一个有趣的例证。他们是完全体面的人。我尊重他们，当我在所罗门遇到问题时，他们帮助了我。他们根本不是坏人。
但是为了赚钱，他们没有也不需要，他们冒着他们所拥有的和他们真正需要的东西的风险。那简直是愚蠢的；你的智商是多少并不重要。如果您为对您不重要的事情冒险对您很重要的事情，那是没有意义的。我不在乎你成功的几率是 99 比 1 还是 1000 比 1。如果你递给我一把带有一百万个弹膛的枪，一个弹膛里有一颗子弹，然后把它放在你的太阳穴上，我扣动扳机就得到报酬，我得到多少报酬都没关系。我不会扣动扳机。你可以说出你想要的任何金额，但它对我没有任何好处，我认为不利的一面是相当明显的。然而，人们在经济上却不假思索地做这件事。
沃尔特·古特曼 (Walter Gutman) 写了一本糟糕的书，标题很好——你只需要致富一次。现在这似乎很基本。如果你在年初有 1 亿美元，如果你没有杠杆，你将赚 10%，如果你在 100 次中被杠杆化 99 次，你将赚 20%，如果在年底，你有 1.1 亿美元或1.2亿美元？这没什么区别。如果你在年底死了，编故事的人可能会打错字，即使你有 120，他也可能会说 110。你一无所获。这完全没有区别。它对你的家人或其他任何人都无动于衷。
不利的一面，特别是如果你在管理别人的钱，不仅会失去你所有的钱，而且是耻辱、羞辱和面对你失去钱的朋友。然而，有 16 个智商很高的人参加了这场比赛。我认为这是疯狂。它是由于对事物的某种程度的过度依赖而产生的。那些人会在所罗门告诉我；六西格码事件不会触动我们。但他们错了。历史不会告诉你未来发生的事情。他们非常依赖数学。他们认为股票的 Beta 告诉你股票的风险。在我看来，它并没有告诉你关于股票风险的该死的事情。
在我看来，Sigma 没有告诉你破产的风险，也许现在他们也认为。但我不喜欢用它们作为例子。同样的事情可能会以不同的方式发生在我们任何人身上，因为我们知道很多其他事情，所以我们对至关重要的事情确实有一个盲点。就像亨利考夫曼所说的那样，“在这种情况下破产的人有两种，一种一无所知，一种无所不知。” 这在某种程度上是可悲的。
我劝你。我们基本上从不借钱。即使我基本上有10,000美元，我也从未借过钱，这有什么不同。我一路走来玩得很开心，除非我有医疗紧急情况，否则我有 10,000 美元、100,000 美元还是 1,000,000 美元并不重要。
当我有一点钱时，我会做和我有很多钱时一样的事情。如果你想想我和你的区别，我们基本上穿同样的衣服（SunTrust 给了我我的），我们吃类似的食物——我们都去麦当劳或者更好，乳品皇后，我们住在温暖的房子里冬天凉爽，夏天凉爽。我们在大屏幕电视上观看内布拉斯加（足球）比赛。你看它的方式和我看它的方式一样。我们做的每一件事都一样——我们的生活并没有那么不同。我们唯一要做的就是以不同的方式旅行。我能做什么你不能做什么？
我开始从事我喜欢的工作，但我一直从事我喜欢的工作。当我认为赚 1,000 美元很重要时，我同样喜欢它。我敦促你从事自己喜欢的工作。我认为如果你继续从事你不喜欢的工作，因为你认为它在你的简历上看起来不错，你就会疯了。前几天我和哈佛的一个同学在一起，他带我去谈话。他 28 岁，他告诉我他在生活中所做的一切，这太棒了。然后我说：“你接下来要做什么？” “嗯，”他说，“也许在我拿到 MBA 学位后，我会去一家咨询公司工作，因为这在我的简历上会很好看。” 我说：“看，你 28 岁，你一直在做所有这些事情，你的简历是我见过的任何人的 10 倍。这不是有点像为你的晚年保存性生活吗？
总有一天，你应该开始做你想做的事。找一份你喜欢的工作。你会在早上从床上跳起来。当我第一次从哥伦比亚商学院毕业时，我想立即为格雷厄姆工作，而无需付出任何代价。他认为我的价格过高。但是我一直缠着他。我卖了三年证券，一直给他写信，最后我为他工作了几年。这是一个很好的经验。但我总是从事我喜欢做的工作。你真的应该找一份工作，如果你独立富有，那将是你会做的工作。你会学到一些东西，你会很兴奋，你会从床上跳起来。你不能错过。你以后可能会尝试别的东西，但你会从中得到更多，我不在乎起薪是多少。
当你离开这里时，找一份你喜欢的工作，而不是一份你认为在你的简历上看起来不错的工作。你应该找到你喜欢的东西。
如果您认为获得 2 倍而不是 1 倍会更快乐，那么您可能犯了一个错误。如果你认为赚 10 倍或 20 倍会让你更快乐，你就会遇到麻烦，因为那样你就会在不应该借钱的时候借钱，或者偷工减料。它只是没有意义，当你回头看时你不会喜欢它。
Question: You were rumored to be one of the rescue buyers of Long Term Capital, what was the play there, what did you see?
Buffett: The Fortune Magazine that has Rupert Murdoch on the cover. It tells the whole story of our involvement; it is kind of an interesting story. I got the really serious call about LTCM on a Friday afternoon that things were getting serious. I know those people most of them pretty well--most of them at Salomon when I was there. And the place was imploding
and the FED was sending people up that weekend. Between that Friday and the following Wed. when the NY Fed, in effect, orchestrated a rescue effort but without any Federal money involved. I was quite active but I was having a terrible time reaching anybody.
We put in a bid on Wednesday morning. I talked to Bill McDonough at the NY Fed. We made a bid for 250 million for the net assets but we would have put in 3 and 3/4 billion on top of that. $3 billion from Berkshire, $700 mil. from AIG and $300 million. from Goldman Sachs. And we submitted that but we put a very short time limit on that because when you are bidding on 100 billion worth of securities that are moving around, you don't want to leave a fixed price bid out there for very long.
In the end the bankers made the deal, but it was an interesting period. The whole LTCM is really fascinating because if you take Larry Hillenbrand, Eric Rosenfeld, John Meriwether and the two Nobel prize winners. If you take the 16 of them, they have about as high an IQ as any 16 people working together in one business in the country, including Microsoft. An incredible amount of intellect in one room. Now you combine that with the fact that those people had extensive experience in the field they were operating in. These were not a bunch of guys who had made their money selling men’s clothing and all of a sudden went into the securities business. They had in aggregate, the 16, had 300 or 400 years of experience doing exactly what they were doing and then you throw in the third factor that most of them had most of their very substantial net worth’s in the businesses. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of their own money up (at risk), super high intellect and working in a field that they knew. Essentially they went broke. That to me is absolutely fascinating.
If I ever write a book it will be called, Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. My partner says it should be autobiographical（70年代芒格曾经因为用margin遇到过巨大麻烦） But this might be an interesting illustration. They are perfectly decent guys. I respect them and they helped me out when I had problems at Salomon. They are not bad people at all.
But to make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and what they did need. That is just plain foolish; it doesn’t matter what your IQ is. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t care if the odds you succeed are 99 to 1 or 1000 to 1 that you succeed. If you hand me a gun with a million chambers with one bullet in a chamber and put it up to your temple and I am paid to pull the trigger, it doesn’t matter how much I would be paid. I would not pull the trigger. You can name any sum you want, but it doesn’t do anything for me on the upside and I think the downside is fairly clear. Yet people do it financially very much without thinking.
There was a lousy book with a great title written by Walter Gutman—You Only Have to Get Rich Once. Now that seems pretty fundamental. If you have $100 million at the beginning of the year and you will make 10% if you are unleveraged and 20% if you are leveraged 99 times out of a 100, what difference if at the end of the year, you have $110 million or $120 million? It makes no difference. If you die at the end of the year, the guy who makes up the story may make a typo, he may have said 110 even though you had a 120. You have gained nothing at all. It makes absolutely no difference. It makes nodifference to your family or anybody else.
The downside, especially if you are managing other people’s money, is not only losing all your money, but it is disgrace, humiliation and facing friends whose money you have lost. Yet 16 guys with very high IQs entered into that game. I think it is madness. It is produced by an over reliance to some extent on things. Those guys would tell me back at Salomon; a six Sigma event wouldn’t touch us. But they were wrong. History does not tell you of future things happening. They had a great reliance on mathematics. They thought that the Beta of the stock told you something about the risk of the stock. It doesn’t tell you a damn thing about the risk of the stock in my view.
Sigma’s do not tell you about the risk of going broke in my view and maybe now in their view too. But I don’t like to use them as an example. The same thing in a different way could happen to any of us, where we really have a blind spot about something that is crucial, because we know a whole lot of something else. It is like Henry Kauffman said, “The ones who are going broke in this situation are of two types, the ones who know nothing and the ones who know everything.” It is sad in a way.
I urge you. We basically never borrow money. I never borrowed money even when I had $10,000 basically, what difference did it make. I was having fun as I went along it didn’t matter whether I had $10,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000 unless I had a medical emergency come along.
I was going to do the same things when I had a little bit of money as when I had a lot of money. If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically (SunTrust gives me mine), we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or better yet, Dairy Queen, and we live in a house that is warm in winter and cool in summer. We watch the Nebraska (football) game on big screen TV. You see it the same way I see it. We do everything the same—our lives are not that different. The only thing we do is we travel differently. What can I do that you can’t do?
I get to work in a job that I love, but I have always worked at a job that I loved. I loved it just as much when I thought it was a big deal to make $1,000. I urge you to work in jobs that you love. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. I was with a fellow at Harvard the other day who was taking me over to talk. He was 28 and he was telling me all that he had done in life, which was terrific. And then I said, “What will you do next?” “Well,” he said, “Maybe after I get my MBA I will go to work for a consulting firm because it will look good on my resume.” I said, “Look, you are 28 and you have been doing all these things, you have a resume 10 times than anybody I have ever seen. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. When I first got out of Columbia Business School, I wanted to go to work for Graham immediately for nothing. He thought I was over-priced. But I kept pestering him. I sold securities for three years and I kept writing him and finally I went to work for him for a couple of years. It was a great experience. ButI always worked in a job that I loved doing. You really should take a job that if you were independently wealthy that would be the job you would take. You will learn something, you will be excited about, and you will jump out of bed. You can’t miss. You may try something else later on, but you will get way more out of it and I don’t care what the starting salary is.
When you get out of here take a job you love, not a job you think will look good on your resume. You ought to find something you like.
If you think you will be happier getting 2x instead of 1x, you are probably making a mistake. You will get in trouble if you think making 10x or 20x will make you happier because then you will borrow money when you shouldn’t or cut corners on things. It just doesn’t make sense and you won’t like it when you look back.