Dale Carnegie’s Most Influential Graduate: Warren Buffet

Quotes from Warren Buffet’s Biography The Snowball:
Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroderer.

“That’s the most important degree that I have.”

Page 1
On Warren Buffet’s office:

He sits surrounded by icons and mementos of fifty years…Over the sofa, a certificate that he completed Dale Carnegie’s public speaking course in January 1952.

Page 98-99
Upon Reading How to Win Friends and Influence People

Unlike most people who read Carnegie’s book and thought, gee, that makes sense, then set the book aside and forgot about it, Warren worked at this project with unusual concentration; he kept coming back to these ideas and using them. Even when he failed and forgot and went for long stretches without applying himself to the system, he returned and resumed practicing in the end. By high school, he had accumulated a few more friends, joined the Woodrow Wilson golf team, and managed to make himself inoffensive if not popular. Dale Carnegie had honed his natural wit; above all, it enhanced his persuasiveness, his flair for salesmanship.

Page 161
Upon attending a Dale Carnegie Course session Triumphant, Warren went to his Dale Carnegie class on schedule.

“That’s the week I won the pencil. They gave a pencil award for doing something difficult and doing the most with the training. The week I won the pencil was the week that I proposed.”

Page 158-159
“I was terrified of public speaking. You can’t believe what I was like if I had to give a talk. I was so terrified that I just couldn’t do it. I would throw up. In fact, I arranged my life so that I never had to get up in front of anybody. When I came out here to Omaha after graduating, I saw another ad. And I knew I was going to have to speak in public sometimes. The agony was such that just to get rid of the pain I signed up for the course again.” That was not his only mission: To win the heart of Susan Thompson, he knew he would have to be able to converse with her as well. The odds against succeeding with Susie were long, but he would do anything to improve them, and this summer might be his last chance.

The Dale Carnegie class met down at the Rome Hotel, a favourite of the cattlemen. ‘I took a hundred bucks in cash and gave it to Wally Keenan, the instructor, and said, ‘Take it before I change my mind.’
‘There were about twenty-five or thirty of us in there. We were all just terrified. We couldn’t say our own names. We all stood there and wouldn’t talk to each other. Meanwhile, one thing that impressed me was that, after meeting all those people once, Wally could rattle off all our names from memory. He was a good teacher, and he tried to teach us the memory association trick, but I never learned that part. ‘They gave us this book of speeches – keynote speech, election speech, lieutenant governor’s speech – and we were supposed to deliver these things every week. The way it works is that you learn to get out of yourself. I mean, why should you be able to talk alone with somebody five minutes before and freeze in front of group? So they teach you the psychological tricks to overcome this. Some of it is just practice – just doing it and practicing. We really helped each other through. And it worked. That’s the most important degree that I have.”