For decades, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett has been dispensing advice not only about business and investing, but also about the keys to a better life.
In many ways, his resume speaks for itself. By the time he stepped down as CEO at the end of 2025, Buffett had built a personal net worth of about $150 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The company he built from a small New England textiles business is now a conglomerate worth more than $1 trillion.
However, 95-year-old Buffett says there are more important measures of personal worth than monetary wealth.
“[There’s] one quality that I measure people by enormously, because everybody can do it, and that’s whether people are kind,” he told Becky Quick in the “Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” special on CNBC. Tune in to CNBC to watch the special on Sunday, Jan. 18 at 3 p.m. ET.
Kindness is “something that really doesn’t cost you anything,” Buffett said. “It is an act that doesn’t belong to any religion, it doesn’t belong to anything. Why in the world wouldn’t you be kind?”
Following in a mentor’s footsteps
Buffett sees profit in treating people with respect, following the model of Tom Murphy, the former CEO of Capital Cities/ABC and one of Buffett’s closest friends.
“I don’t know anybody that had more good interactions, whether it was with buying businesses, whether it was operating businesses, whether it was dealing with any person’s problems that came to him. I mean, it was just built into his behavior, in every way,” Buffett said of Murphy.
Murphy’s most prescient advice, per Buffett: “You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.”
While Buffett acknowledged it can be tempting and satisfying to treat people this way, “What have you ever gained?” he asked Quick. “I mean, the only thing is, you may have felt a little bit better.”
That isn’t to say that Buffett conducts business with blind cheeriness and optimism — nor did Murphy, Buffett said. “He wasn’t a Pollyanna. He made all kinds of big decisions,” he said.
But over the course of your life, even if you have to be incisive in your decision-making, you’ll be better off having treated people warmly, Buffett said.
He recalled the reflections of former Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli: “When you get old, he says, you got the reputation you deserve.”
Buffett said it’s worth it for everyone to make an effort to build a reputation for kindness. “You haven’t given up anything. It’s just so easy, and you get it back with interest,” he said.
The “net happiness of the world” would be better, Buffett said, if every morning, people said to themselves, “I’ll have things that are good and bad that happen to me today, but I can be kind to anybody.”
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