The portrait of the ‘fascinating and deeply complex man’ is the result of five years of interviewing Buffett and 250 people, apart from ‘virtually unlimited time’ Schroeder spent in roaming ‘with surprising freedom among the files and correspondence in his exhaustive collection.’

This is a man who loves money, a man for whom the game of collecting it runs in his veins as his lifeblood, Schroeder introduces. Yet, his message is that getting rich quick isn’t the worthiest goal in life.

“The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you,” Buffett advises students who come to see him. And their questions come thick and fast, and so do the answers.

“How do I find the right spouse? Marry up… How do I know what’s right? Follow your Inner Scorecard. What should I do about a career? Find something you are passionate about. I only work with people I like. If you go to work every morning with your stomach churning, you’re in the wrong business.” And he tells the young that the body has to be treated like the only car you’ll ever own.

The ‘Oracle of Omaha,’ guided by his principle – ‘Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful’ – is urging everyone to invest in the US stocks.

However, he would never call himself courageous, says Schroeder. “It was his Inner Scorecard that made him cling to his margin of safety… It was his urge to preach that made him want to warn the world of dangers to come.”

There are sufficient and more warnings that he has issued in his recent writings. “In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary,” observed Buffett in an op-ed piece in the October 16 issue of The New York Times.

Among the many words of caution from Buffett is his calling derivatives ‘toxic’ and ‘time bombs,’ as in a 2002 shareholder letter. “In his 2003 letter, Buffett wrote of derivatives as ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’ So many of these deals existed, he wrote, that they had formed a daisy chain around the globe,” the author recounts.

“Despite the advice of their mathematical models to buy rather than sell into a crisis, when trouble approached, investors fled their watering hole like a herd of giraffes escaping a lion. And while many people appeared to be participating in a market, in fact a handful of large financial institutions would always tend to dominate it using their leverage.”

The beginnings of ‘mass destruction’ could be seen in the mobile-home industry in 2002, narrates Schroeder. “Stung by bad loans, lenders were cutting off funding or raising interest rates to prohibitive levels… Buffett knew that the first sign of a deflating credit bubble is when the bankruptcy wolf cuts a weak sheep out of the pack.”

Edging close to 80, Buffett would be happy if the next 10 years’ worth of newspapers were delivered to his doorstep right now. The years ahead weren’t endless, but with luck they could be long, reasons Schroeder.

“Trees don’t grow to the sky, but he wasn’t scraping the horizon yet. Another new person, another investment, another idea always waited for him. The things left to learn far exceeded what he already knew.”

One of his lessons is the ‘twenty punches’ approach to investing. “You’d get very rich if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch,” he explains.

“You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.”

Schroeder is of the view that Buffett ran his life too on the twenty punches principles. “Same house, same wife for fifty years, same Astrid on Farnam Street; no desire to buy and sell real estate, art, cars, tokens of wealth; no jumping from city to city or career to career.

An unputdownable read.

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