There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing. … For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I'm dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I'm not taking the American people seriously. I'm absolutely positive that I'm serving the American people better if I'm maintaining my authenticity. And that's an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I'm at my best when I believe what I am saying.

The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That's the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic. If a bunch of lawyers were to introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die. So never forget, when you're a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff, but you don't have to buy it. In your own life, what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.

Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime it's just too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions. That judgment became ever more compelling as Berkshire's capital mushroomed and the universe of investments that could significantly affect our results shrank dramatically. Therefore, we adopted a strategy that required our being smart - and not too smart at that - only a very few times. Indeed, we'll now settle for one good idea a year. (Charlie says it's my turn.)

Do you have a big visionary master plan for how the world will work in twenty years? Do you have massive ambitions to revolutionize your industry? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. I never did. A year and a half after starting CD Baby, it was just me and John, my first employee, running it out of my house. One night, I decided I should think more about the long-term future of this thing. I sat with my diary for a few hours of introspection. Afterwards, I wrote John an email that went like this: “I think there’s a chance that this thing might be huge one day, so we better start preparing for that now. I mean some day, we might have a thousand artists. We might need a third employee! We’d need three computers, and need to figure out how to network them together. We might even need to start moving CDs into the garage, since eventually they might fill up the living room. Yes, I know it sounds grandiose, but I think things are headed that way.” Years later, after I had 100,000 artists and 85 employees, John would often get a good laugh out of this letter I sent him in 1999. Journalists would ask, “What’s your long-term goal?” I’d say, “I don’t have one. I surpassed my goals long ago. I’m just trying to help musicians with whatever they need today.” So please don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.

I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after.

I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. 'Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, "Yes, that was good."