5 ms·

I love this. I remember reading an anecdote of Gates discussing his relationship with Buffet — there may be a video interview — where Gates was astounded at how

I love this. I remember reading an anecdote of Gates discussing his relationship with Buffet — there may be a video interview — where Gates was astounded at how empty Buffet’s calendar was. As a founder, I’m more of a Buffet. I schedule time when and where necessary (which is, admittedly, most of my time most weeks) but I hate feeling as if I’m restricted to obeying numbers in a database in order to function. It fills me with an inordinate amount of joy to imagine the simplicity of a world in which you’d only return home to eat. I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience. Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings. [Edit] Apparently, this anecdote is very famous and very Google-able: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/warren-buffett-taught-bill-gates-about-time-management-by-sharing-his-blank-calendar.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/warren-buffett-taught-bill-g...

ehnto 7y ago
> I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience. This is exactly how I spent my youth, and I try to use how I felt those moments as a comparison for how engaged I with the real world at any point. If I find myself too decoupled from real life and too deep into work, I will extract myself by leaving the house without any devices or any place to be. I love those moments. I no longer carry a smartphone with me, just a standalone smartwatch for incoming calls, so that's actually made those moments to be any moment I'm not at my desk. It's why travel, even local travel, is so important to me. I can live moment to moment, experiencing life in simple visceral terms. How do I feel right now, and what does that make me want to do? Well, let's do that then.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  Backpacking is the essence of travelling you describe. Just buy a return ticket, some guidebook (not necessary but usually more help than harm), maybe a local phrasebook. Ideally avoid most touristic places or zoom through them quickly. Living in the moment, many unplanned unique experiences every single day, 2 week vacation feels like a month or two passed by. I did that in India&Nepal twice, each time 3 months, and I literally forgot about reality back home, it felt like 5 lives before, memory of a distant dream. Submersion was absolute, same for my partner back then. It helped it was 2008 & 2010, we didn't have phones with us. These days, I can afford to travel in much more luxury but I will always revert to backpacking. It is simply better, more rewarding and intense experience. But sometimes I need to rest after such a vacation :)
  - kilroy_jones 7y ago
    I never felt at ease backpacking. In places like India and Nepal you spend most of your time playing tourist alongside other people's poverty while enjoying advantageous exchange rates that exist for all sorts of horrid reasons both past and present.
    - saiya-jin 7y ago
      Hmm, I guess we do it differently then. I am not saying I didn't also experience of what you describe, poverty is literally inescapable in India unless you bury yourself in some 5-star hotel. And Nepal is still one of the poorest countries of the world. But these things were never core of the experience. Frankly, quite opposite. Generousness of the poor is not something to shy away from, I am happy to be helped, share a dinner with them, listen to their life stories, and help them out if I can. I don't feel any ancestor's guilt like folks from some parts western Europe could, I come from country which never enslaved another one. Maybe its just about optics on same things - my beer is definitely half full when travelling. My budget spent in the poor remote area will trickle a bit into local economy. Maybe its a bit about expectations - I don't travel to have it easy or only positive. Intensity is what matters more.
      - kilroy_jones 7y ago
        The Nepalese are extremely friendly, and I don't regret going, I just walked away with different feelings. For me it's not about guilt, it's about the shock of being part of a global economy that is at its core exploitative. That I live comfortably while these people don't have basic medical care, and my little splurges are equal to a days wage for them. Basically it was a window into the incredible, and unnecessary, inequality that exists. Something that didn't really hit me fully until I experienced it first hand.
alexpotato 7y ago
> Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings. I remember reading a couple first hand account books ranging from the 1880s to the 1920s and I remember being surprised at how modern the English was. It felt like I was reading a book written yesterday. Working in technology sometimes feels like things are changing too quickly to keep up. Reading a 100 year old book and thinking, "This guy is totally understandable and relatable!" was a nice reminder that some things stay the same.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
To me a calendar is not a constraint. It's a god send. I don't feel trapped with all the things on my calendar: I chose to put them in there so I want to do them. The reason I have a calendar is not to structure my life at all. It's just so I can forget all that stuff while I have no reason to think about it. Set it in the calendar, forget it. It will pop up in the morning, when I need it. It's so relaxing.
- Jagat 7y ago
  This. Calendars, TODO lists, reminders, alarms. These things free up my mind so I can focus on other things instead of worrying about what I should be doing right now because I don't have it written anywhere.
  - gerbilly 7y ago
    I don't have anything to do right now, and that's even better than needing to be reminded. I make sacrifices to keep my schedule as slack as possible.
    - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
      On my calendar today: - Lunch with some friends. - A call with a client this afternoon. The first one is not "a sacrifice". The second is potentially going to make me earn one month of salary in a day of work. So yeah, I want that to be reminded to me. But even if you don't want a schedule (you are rich or don't work much, don't plan things with your friends, etc), well, a calendar is not just for what you do. E.G: I'm visiting my mother this week. Tomorrow though, I have an entry saying she is out of town. She told me that 2 days ago, and that's useful information for many reasons, but not something I want to keep in my head. Tomorrow morning, I will read it, and just integrate the information into my day. Now you might argue: friends and family or a big clients are important enough, you should not need a calendar to remember that. Or, you should not plan things with your friends, it's spontaneous. Or you should communicate with your mother. But that's not the point. I don't have a calendar because I have to. Nobody cares that I have one. I have one because it frees my mind of all those informations. This way I can focus in the now. When I'm having lunch with my friends, I'm not thinking about the client call, and yet, there is no chance for me to miss it. It's fantastic, given the price is a few seconds to add entries, and a few more to review them.
Spooky23 7y ago
Keep in mind that Buffet is a different kind of manager. Gates is a notorious micromanager (in the early days of MS he memorized employee license plates to keep tabs on comings and goings). Buffet is a macro kind of guy. He buys companies, leaves management in place and skims the cream.
tim333 7y ago
Impressive given Berkshire had 300k+ employees. I guess he's good at delegating.
- gshubert17 7y ago
  I think the number of staff at BRK's Omaha headquarters is around 30. He is indeed good at delegating. Buffet mentions this quite a lot in his annual letters. http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html
PavlovsCat 7y ago
https://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/blight_576 https://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/blight_576
esotericn 7y ago
I really try to live up this mindset but I find it very different. The crucial thing really is that as a child everyone else is in the same boat. As an adult? Pretty much all of my friends are either at work or plan their calendars to the gills. Even if you try, I'm not sure you can 'go back', unfortunately. I can't remember the last time I was able to call someone and say 'yo, wanna do X?' and they actually could without advance planning.
- ubertakter 7y ago
  Take a cue from what my friends and I do: we generally agree to do whatever in general terms, say, visit a place Saturday after lunch. That's it. We might coordinate on a start time, but after that, it's whatever we feel like, no set schedule. We occasionally do this for longer trips, where we rent a cabin somewhere for a few days and then just do whatever we feel like. There's some planning involved in order to get to the correct area with the correct equipment (whatever is needed for the activity), but there's no strict timeline. By the way, my wife is a "planner", so this drivers her crazy, not that she is going with us anyway. So a conversation might be like this: Wife:"What time are you going to the brewery?" Me:"Eh, after lunch" Wife:"So what time?" Me:"Maybe 1300?" Wife:"After that?" Me:"We'll get dinner somewhere" Wife:"Where? When?" Me:"Somewhere, whenever we get hungry. We'll decide on-the-fly." Wife:"Arrrggghhh!!" I have to confess I get a lot of amusement out of her reactions.

ehnto 7y ago

> I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience. This is exactly how I spent my youth, and I try to use how I felt those moments as a comparison for how engaged I with the real world at any point. If I find myself too decoupled from real life and too deep into work, I will extract myself by leaving the house without any devices or any place to be. I love those moments. I no longer carry a smartphone with me, just a standalone smartwatch for incoming calls, so that's actually made those moments to be any moment I'm not at my desk. It's why travel, even local travel, is so important to me. I can live moment to moment, experiencing life in simple visceral terms. How do I feel right now, and what does that make me want to do? Well, let's do that then.

saiya-jin 7y ago
Backpacking is the essence of travelling you describe. Just buy a return ticket, some guidebook (not necessary but usually more help than harm), maybe a local phrasebook. Ideally avoid most touristic places or zoom through them quickly. Living in the moment, many unplanned unique experiences every single day, 2 week vacation feels like a month or two passed by. I did that in India&Nepal twice, each time 3 months, and I literally forgot about reality back home, it felt like 5 lives before, memory of a distant dream. Submersion was absolute, same for my partner back then. It helped it was 2008 & 2010, we didn't have phones with us. These days, I can afford to travel in much more luxury but I will always revert to backpacking. It is simply better, more rewarding and intense experience. But sometimes I need to rest after such a vacation :)
- kilroy_jones 7y ago
  I never felt at ease backpacking. In places like India and Nepal you spend most of your time playing tourist alongside other people's poverty while enjoying advantageous exchange rates that exist for all sorts of horrid reasons both past and present.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    Hmm, I guess we do it differently then. I am not saying I didn't also experience of what you describe, poverty is literally inescapable in India unless you bury yourself in some 5-star hotel. And Nepal is still one of the poorest countries of the world. But these things were never core of the experience. Frankly, quite opposite. Generousness of the poor is not something to shy away from, I am happy to be helped, share a dinner with them, listen to their life stories, and help them out if I can. I don't feel any ancestor's guilt like folks from some parts western Europe could, I come from country which never enslaved another one. Maybe its just about optics on same things - my beer is definitely half full when travelling. My budget spent in the poor remote area will trickle a bit into local economy. Maybe its a bit about expectations - I don't travel to have it easy or only positive. Intensity is what matters more.
    - kilroy_jones 7y ago
      The Nepalese are extremely friendly, and I don't regret going, I just walked away with different feelings. For me it's not about guilt, it's about the shock of being part of a global economy that is at its core exploitative. That I live comfortably while these people don't have basic medical care, and my little splurges are equal to a days wage for them. Basically it was a window into the incredible, and unnecessary, inequality that exists. Something that didn't really hit me fully until I experienced it first hand.

alexpotato 7y ago

> Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings. I remember reading a couple first hand account books ranging from the 1880s to the 1920s and I remember being surprised at how modern the English was. It felt like I was reading a book written yesterday. Working in technology sometimes feels like things are changing too quickly to keep up. Reading a 100 year old book and thinking, "This guy is totally understandable and relatable!" was a nice reminder that some things stay the same.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

To me a calendar is not a constraint. It's a god send. I don't feel trapped with all the things on my calendar: I chose to put them in there so I want to do them. The reason I have a calendar is not to structure my life at all. It's just so I can forget all that stuff while I have no reason to think about it. Set it in the calendar, forget it. It will pop up in the morning, when I need it. It's so relaxing.

Jagat 7y ago
This. Calendars, TODO lists, reminders, alarms. These things free up my mind so I can focus on other things instead of worrying about what I should be doing right now because I don't have it written anywhere.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  I don't have anything to do right now, and that's even better than needing to be reminded. I make sacrifices to keep my schedule as slack as possible.
  - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
    On my calendar today: - Lunch with some friends. - A call with a client this afternoon. The first one is not "a sacrifice". The second is potentially going to make me earn one month of salary in a day of work. So yeah, I want that to be reminded to me. But even if you don't want a schedule (you are rich or don't work much, don't plan things with your friends, etc), well, a calendar is not just for what you do. E.G: I'm visiting my mother this week. Tomorrow though, I have an entry saying she is out of town. She told me that 2 days ago, and that's useful information for many reasons, but not something I want to keep in my head. Tomorrow morning, I will read it, and just integrate the information into my day. Now you might argue: friends and family or a big clients are important enough, you should not need a calendar to remember that. Or, you should not plan things with your friends, it's spontaneous. Or you should communicate with your mother. But that's not the point. I don't have a calendar because I have to. Nobody cares that I have one. I have one because it frees my mind of all those informations. This way I can focus in the now. When I'm having lunch with my friends, I'm not thinking about the client call, and yet, there is no chance for me to miss it. It's fantastic, given the price is a few seconds to add entries, and a few more to review them.

Spooky23 7y ago

Keep in mind that Buffet is a different kind of manager. Gates is a notorious micromanager (in the early days of MS he memorized employee license plates to keep tabs on comings and goings). Buffet is a macro kind of guy. He buys companies, leaves management in place and skims the cream.

tim333 7y ago

Impressive given Berkshire had 300k+ employees. I guess he's good at delegating.

gshubert17 7y ago
I think the number of staff at BRK's Omaha headquarters is around 30. He is indeed good at delegating. Buffet mentions this quite a lot in his annual letters. http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

PavlovsCat 7y ago

https://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/blight_576 https://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/blight_576

esotericn 7y ago

I really try to live up this mindset but I find it very different. The crucial thing really is that as a child everyone else is in the same boat. As an adult? Pretty much all of my friends are either at work or plan their calendars to the gills. Even if you try, I'm not sure you can 'go back', unfortunately. I can't remember the last time I was able to call someone and say 'yo, wanna do X?' and they actually could without advance planning.

ubertakter 7y ago
Take a cue from what my friends and I do: we generally agree to do whatever in general terms, say, visit a place Saturday after lunch. That's it. We might coordinate on a start time, but after that, it's whatever we feel like, no set schedule. We occasionally do this for longer trips, where we rent a cabin somewhere for a few days and then just do whatever we feel like. There's some planning involved in order to get to the correct area with the correct equipment (whatever is needed for the activity), but there's no strict timeline. By the way, my wife is a "planner", so this drivers her crazy, not that she is going with us anyway. So a conversation might be like this: Wife:"What time are you going to the brewery?" Me:"Eh, after lunch" Wife:"So what time?" Me:"Maybe 1300?" Wife:"After that?" Me:"We'll get dinner somewhere" Wife:"Where? When?" Me:"Somewhere, whenever we get hungry. We'll decide on-the-fly." Wife:"Arrrggghhh!!" I have to confess I get a lot of amusement out of her reactions.