Warren Buffett’s advice for college students: Chase the job you’d want if ‘you had no need for money’
By | Megan Sauer | www.cnbc.com
When Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett speaks with college kids, he offers a piece of valuable career advice: Seek personal fulfilment over pure profit.
That means pursuing a job that you actually enjoy, in a workplace with talented people you actively admire, Buffett wrote on Saturday in his annual letter to shareholders. Or, to put it another way, he advised: Job seekers should seek employment in the field “they would select if they had no need for money.”
“Economic realities, I acknowledge, may interfere with that kind of search,” Buffett continued. “Even so, I urge the students never to give up the quest, for when they find that sort of job, they will no longer be ‘working.’”
The 91-year-old billionaire — currently the world’s fifth-richest person, with a net worth of $114.7 billion, according to Forbes — speaks from personal experience. In his letter, Buffett wrote that he and his business partner Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s vice chair, both started as “part-timers” at his grandfather’s grocery store in the early 1940s, where they were “assigned boring tasks and paid little.”
