Warren Buffett celebrates his 94th birthday on Friday, August 30.
The legendary investor dreads his big day as he hates getting older and doesn't care about gifts.
Buffett sees life as a snowball rolling downhill, and aims to make money and friends along the way.
Warren Buffett, who turns 94 on Friday, August 30, dreads his birthday. Yet the renowned investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO knows there's no going back, so he focuses on squeezing as much as possible from the years he has left.
Fantastically rich but famously frugal, Buffett enjoys the flood of birthday cards, gifts, and letters that inundates Berkshire's headquarters every August. But he hates getting older.
"Buffett was far from jaded, but it was hard to thrill a multibillionaire — one who didn't want to be a year older and cared nothing about possessions — with a birthday gift," Alice Schroeder writes in "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life."
Buffett's biographer said the investor was thankful for the heartfelt letters and reminders of his past adventures, but he had filled an entire floor of hallways with memorabilia from his life. She described the approach of each birthday as a "metronomic tick of doom" for Buffett: he was always shocked by his advancing age, and desperate to delay the inevitable as there was so much more he wished to do.
"The years ahead weren't endless, but with luck they could be long," Schroeder wrote. "Another new person, another investment, another idea always waited for him. The things left to learn far exceeded what he already knew."
Buffett envisions his life as a snowball rolling downhill, and he concentrates on compounding his wealth and collecting great friends along the way.
"You'd better be picking up snow as you go along, because you're not going to be getting back up to the top of the hill again," he told Schroeder. "That's the way life works."
Over his 94 years, Buffett has amassed a $148 billion fortune — even after donating more than half of his Berkshire stock to good causes. He's also built a $1 trillion company, acquired iconic businesses such as Geico and See's Candies, bailed out behemoths like Goldman Sachs and General Electric, established multibillion-dollar stakes in public companies including Apple and Coca-Cola, inspired scores of business leaders, and transformed how many organizations are structured and run.
"The snowball he had created so carefully was enormous by now," Schroeder writes. "Yet his attitude toward it remained the same.
"However many birthdays lay ahead, he would always be astonished each time the calendar turned, and as long as he lived, he would never stop feeling like a sprout.
"For he wasn't looking backward to the top of the hill. It was a big world, and he was just starting out."
Read the original article on Business Insider