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This fluff piece was written so quickly that the author did not correctly comprehend a two-word quote that he uses: > Coming out of college, Warren Buffett wan

This fluff piece was written so quickly that the author did not correctly comprehend a two-word quote that he uses: > Coming out of college, Warren Buffett wanted to work for Benjamin Graham to learn to be a value investor. Buffett offered to work for free, and Graham responded, “You’re overpriced.” What that means is you have to make sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship. No, what that means is that, as a fresh college graduate, Buffet added negative value to Graham. (Hence, even at $0 he was too expensive.) Blog posts are often a bit like code: They take more effort to read than they do to write. In this case, the author spends so little time trying to produce something worth reading that I couldn't finish the article. Even for free, this post was overpriced.

marmaduke 7y ago
I like to think of reading as as a transformation which has a null space where all the dumb shit goes. This one went there. It doesn't mean you can't pull out other interesting tidbits like scaling better by growing a team instead individual contributions. This correlates with other blog posts which I can't recall now.
neonate 7y ago
It seems to me that the author comprehends the quote perfectly well. His point is that since Buffett was adding negative value to Graham out of the gate, he'd have needed to do something extra to make hiring him worth Graham's while. And that doing that something extra would have been a good investment because of the learning opportunities it would bring. That's the apprenticeship part. Disagree with the argument if you like (I do too), but don't read it unfairly and then rip him for it.
- teachrdan 7y ago
  Perhaps what we disagree on here is semantics. When I read, > you have to make sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship I understand that to mean that in order to even apply for / commit to an apprenticeship, you have to make sacrifices. In the context of the rest of his narrative, that means sacrificing a safer, better paying, more conventional career for being a gopher for a would-be titan of Silicon Valley. Obviously, if you have the chance to be the gopher for an actual titan of industry, it's probably worth any reasonable sacrifice. But that's not what the author is promoting. He's promoting the "hustle 24/7" mentality even as a barista in the hopes that your manager will reward your entrepreneurial sprit--or, more likely, a newbie founder who will at best will exit their startup somewhere in the high six to low seven figures and leave you with little more than a few hundred thousand dollars of opportunity cost.
  - neonate 7y ago
    I totally agree that the value of such an apprenticeship depends on how titanic the master is, which means it's mostly not going to be all that valuable. I still think Naval understood the point about negative value perfectly well.

marmaduke 7y ago

I like to think of reading as as a transformation which has a null space where all the dumb shit goes. This one went there. It doesn't mean you can't pull out other interesting tidbits like scaling better by growing a team instead individual contributions. This correlates with other blog posts which I can't recall now.

neonate 7y ago

It seems to me that the author comprehends the quote perfectly well. His point is that since Buffett was adding negative value to Graham out of the gate, he'd have needed to do something extra to make hiring him worth Graham's while. And that doing that something extra would have been a good investment because of the learning opportunities it would bring. That's the apprenticeship part. Disagree with the argument if you like (I do too), but don't read it unfairly and then rip him for it.

teachrdan 7y ago
Perhaps what we disagree on here is semantics. When I read, > you have to make sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship I understand that to mean that in order to even apply for / commit to an apprenticeship, you have to make sacrifices. In the context of the rest of his narrative, that means sacrificing a safer, better paying, more conventional career for being a gopher for a would-be titan of Silicon Valley. Obviously, if you have the chance to be the gopher for an actual titan of industry, it's probably worth any reasonable sacrifice. But that's not what the author is promoting. He's promoting the "hustle 24/7" mentality even as a barista in the hopes that your manager will reward your entrepreneurial sprit--or, more likely, a newbie founder who will at best will exit their startup somewhere in the high six to low seven figures and leave you with little more than a few hundred thousand dollars of opportunity cost.
- neonate 7y ago
  I totally agree that the value of such an apprenticeship depends on how titanic the master is, which means it's mostly not going to be all that valuable. I still think Naval understood the point about negative value perfectly well.