Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, 1978–2023
if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.
USC Gould School of Law commencement, 2007, Speakola, 2007 source ↗
The question
If you could alter one thing about yourself, what would it be?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
Verbatim recurring item in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire; two publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, 1978–2023
if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.
USC Gould School of Law commencement, 2007, Speakola, 2007 source ↗
I would be a better, faster, and more faithful writer of letters and e-mails, and returner of phone calls.
I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
My inability to keep track of personal possessions.
I would love to have a better sense of physical balance.
inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can't solve in other ways.
Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
I realized very early that non-egality would work better in the parts of the world I wanted to inhabit. What do I mean by non-egality? I mean John Wooden, when he was the number one basketball coach in the world. He just said to the bottom five players, “You don't get to play. You're sparring partners.” The top seven did all the playing.
All my life, I've gone through life anticipating trouble. And here I am, well along on my eighty-fourth year, and like Epictetus, I've had a favored life. It didn't make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came. It didn't hurt me at all. In fact, it helped me.
John Wooden, when he was the number one basketball coach in the world. He just said to the bottom five players, “You don't get to play. You're sparring partners.” The top seven did all the playing.
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.
Derek Sivers, Mellody Hobson, Carrie Fisher, David Hyde Pierce, Patti LaBelle, Naomi Campbell
Search the directory for somebody in particular.