What is your worst intellectual habit?

They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet. I do not at all excuse myself for this foolish neglect of opportunities procured at so much expense by my parents and brought so forcibly to my attention by my Preceptors.

Ironically, though, this is also the purchase in which I made my biggest mistake - of a kind, however, never recognized on financial statements. We paid $600 million in 1989 for Gillette preferred shares that were convertible into 48 million (split-adjusted) common shares. Taking an alternative route with the $600 million, I probably could have purchased 60 million shares of common from the company. The market on the common was then about $10.50, and given that this would have been a huge private placement carrying important restrictions, I probably could have bought the stock at a discount of at least 5%. I can't be sure about this, but it's likely that Gillette's management would have been just as happy to have Berkshire opt for common. But I was far too clever to do that.

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.

Rushing to judgment. Looking for the bad in someone else before anything else.

Overthinking. I tend to conflate the amount of time spent on something with how good it is. Sometimes intuition is better than proof, and gut instinct better than hours of “work.”

I’m prone to overexplaining things –- when my own understanding of them is shaky. The better I know something, the shorter my prose.

I question everything. This is also my greatest intellectual habit.

I’ll get half way through a book and then jump to another.

Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.

Reading too many books at the same time.

Checking email when I don’t know an answer.

Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.

My worst intellectual habit has to be overanalyzing everything. I do it all the time, because there are too many options in this world.

Impatience. My mind moves rapidly.

I’m too quick to jump to a negative conclusion. For example, if I’ve had a book come out recently and I’m with a friend who doesn’t mention it, instead of thinking, “This person hasn’t mentioned my book because they’re busy and haven’t had time to purchase it, much less read it, and that doesn’t mean that they don’t like me,” I will go to, “This person doesn’t care about me,” which is such a terrible, self-centered way to think. People really are busy and their world doesn’t stop just because I’ve published a novel.

I don’t believe anything is black and white, so I’m always searching for nuance. On the whole I think this is a positive thing, but it also means I almost never give an unqualified answer.

I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.

My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.

I probably want to be liked too much. This is one difference between me and Steve Levitt . Steve Levitt is also much smarter than me and much more successful than me. And that doesn’t bother me at all, but he said he also doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him, or doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks about him. I actually do care what people think about me. I’d quite like people to think I’m a nice guy, so I’m probably self-censoring at times. Say, maybe I won’t say that because people wouldn’t like that. And that’s probably a fault in a newspaper columnist — you probably shouldn’t care what people think about you, but that’s the way it is.

Often, what happens in science is you got a problem and you solve it, and then there’s not much else to do and you have to move on. But the ribosome turned out to be a rather rich gold mine. Perhaps I’m a little intellectually lazy and feel like, “Why should I bother thinking about something else?” Maybe at some point, I should have thought, “I should do something different.”