Vibrant Nation

Notes on a marriage

Warren Buffett's first wife, Susie, was a very wise woman. She was very smart. She got into a very traditional marriage in the 1950s, where the wife was supportive of the husband’s career. She raised the children, as, sort of, a single mother. But she had ambitions of her own. She was creative. She had an artistic bent. She was musical and had the potential for a musical career. And when those urges came out, it created an irreconcilable rift in her marriage, because Warren’s needs were insatiable in terms of the support he needed from a wife. Susie was not able to fulfill them and take care of her own needs. And, of course, emotionally, it was a one-way street with Warren. Susie had reached the point at which she felt she deserved more, yet, being a very giving person, she still spent the entire rest of her life trying to be the wife and make sure Warren was taken care of.

She went to San Francisco and she had her lover, but she kept her life secret to avoid disturbing Warren’s world view, to protect Warren. She sacrificed a lot of things. She had great independent wealth -- there was nothing stopping her from buying a huge house in San Francisco or from buying a plane -- but it also felt like she didn’t use it, because that would have embarrassed Warren.

Susie Buffett as everywoman

You know, women cannot get away with what men can get away with. Warren lived openly with another woman, but Susie couldn’t do that. She made sure that Warren was taken care of at home and had another woman to live with. She arranged that. And I think she let her life get very complicated in order to juggle all this. I think most women can relate to having to juggle the needs of so many people and still trying to find that time to go get a pedicure every now and then just so you have an hour for yourself. That was Susie Buffett.

Warren Buffett's money

Susie and Warren had a very unusual dynamic over money. It was important to Warren to feel in control, so, while he had bestowed billions of dollars worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock on Susie, she couldn’t touch it. And yet she was able to get him to spend money on her. He spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on Susie, most of which she gave away. But it was a constant negotiation between them. And, to some extent, it was part of their relationship to haggle over money. Withholding money made Warren feel needed; getting him to part with it made Susie feel powerful. Warren, too, felt powerful having to be convinced to part with it. As it is in many relationships, part of the balance of power in theirs had to do with the money.

I always believed that old saying that there are, at most, two people who know what is going on inside a marriage. I don’t claim to fully understand the dynamic between them. I think that it would be presumptuous to say I did. But they clearly cared deeply about each other. They also had different goals in life. And they found ways to make it work, including philanthropy, including the money and the way they handled it together, including their kids, and including the publicity of being this very famous couple. They're like a lot of couples in that there are lots of factors that enter into what keeps people together -- and it’s not simple.

The compounding effect: Why it's never too late

I started working on this book when I was 47. I was excited, but I was also a little daunted about having made my fourth career shift at nearly 50 years old. And Warren said to me, “You know, when I was 47, I thought my life was over.” That was the year that Susie had left him, and at that time, he thought he had accomplished everything important that he ever would accomplish in his life: He’d been CEO of several companies; he’d sat on many boards; he was a multi-multimillionaire. And he really thought he was done at 47. He was very depressed, because he thought, “Well, there’s not much time left to do anything of any importance.” He told me, “Looking back, everything of any real significance that’s happened to me in my life [other than marrying Susie] has happened since then.” He didn't know it at the time, but the groundwork had been laid before, and he now had resources to draw on and skills and relationships that just manifested themselves much later.

It was really inspiring, because it reminded me that it was the first half of my life. As he pointed out, “You’re only halfway through your adult life—don’t forget that.” Also, because of the compounding effect, everything that you’ve learned up to this point begins to work for you at a faster and faster rate as you get past the age of 50. So you’ve spent all these years investing in yourself, and now it starts to really pay off. I felt relief and inspiration. I owe Warren Buffett a lot, because he inspired me to believe that I could accomplish enormous things that I would not have had the ambition to attempt without his persuasion that it was possible.

The ferocity of women: Why women make great entrepreneurs

I was just at a seminar that teaches entrepreneurship to people who aren’t entrepreneurs, and one of the things that they pointed out is that entrepreneurs almost invariably are people who look at whatever they’ve got and figure out something they can do with it.

The reason that job hunting’s hard, if you’re a mom and you’ve been in and out of the work force, is that a company is sitting there with a job description and it’s expecting a Miss America who is a Rhodes scholar and who also worked for the White House. They’re expecting ridiculous things!

Entrepreneurs create their own jobs by looking at everything they’ve done -- and then they just find something to do with it. Moms who have raised kids have an incredible array of skills and they can find something to do, but it may not be in a big corporation. It may be that they have to create their own job.

What I’ve found is that people who are entrepreneurs -- and “entrepreneur” can be anything: I know a guy who started a business selling recycled sneakers -- just look around them and say, “I’ve got to feed my family next week.” And they go to it. I know a woman who was divorced and she thought her kids were going to starve, so she started recycling scrap metal by just picking it up and selling it. She now runs a huge company and is very rich, 20 years later. And she did it out of dire necessity.

The ferocity of women to protect their families is the single biggest strength they have. You don’t need a resume if you’ve got that. Scarlett O'Hara should be the role model right now for every woman on this planet. You know, “As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again.” And she had nothing. It’s a ferocious unwillingness to let fate just do you in. She sat there with a turnip she'd dug up out of the ground, and she said, “I will not let the universe do this to me.”

Women have that. Women have that ferociousness in them. They really do -- especially when they’ve got people depending on them. They can find it within themselves.