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Rubén Andrés
WriterWriter at Xataka. I've been working remotely for more than a decade and I'm a strong advocate of technology as a way to improve our lives. Full-time addict of black, sugar-free coffee.
Alba Mora
WriterAn established tech journalist, I entered the world of consumer tech by chance in 2018. In my writing and translating career, I've also covered a diverse range of topics, including entertainment, travel, science, and the economy.
As the Berkshire Hathaway CEO, Warren Buffett was one of Wall Street’s most brilliant and successful investors more than six decades. Meanwhile, Bill Gates spent four decades running Microsoft. Both became billionaires in the process and agree that they would never have achieved this success without one key factor: focusing on achieving their goals.
Being focused and constant. In an interview with CNBC, Buffett recounted how Gates’ father once gathered a group of 20 people, including Gates himself, and asked each person to write down one word that explained their success. “Bill and I [had] only met twice [and] didn’t know what the other own was writing down. We both wrote the same word, which was ‘focus.’”
Both Gates and Buffett attribute much of their wealth and legacy to their ability to avoid distractions and stay committed to their goals for decades. For them, focus isn’t just a useful skill. It’s the foundation on which they built their empires.
While others were playing, Gates was programming. In his autobiographical book Source Code: My Beginnings, Gates reveals that he used to code as a teenager. Programming was a creative way for him to organize ideas and test his logical thinking skills. This led to his obsession with creating different programs at a time when access to computers was scarce and primarily available to universities and large companies.
Gates and his high school friends managed to secure free shared access time to one of those expensive computers. This allowed them to learn programming when few understood it. Gates’ obsession with software eventually contributed to his fortune, which is valued at $114.2 billion according to Forbes.
Starting young. “The thing you do obsessively between age 13 and 18, that’s the thing you have the most chance of being world-class at. And I only have one thing that I did obsessively from 13 to 18 and that is write, try to write good software,” Gates said in a 2016 interview on The Charlie Rose Show.
Meanwhile, Buffett was focused on learning to invest during his formative years. “He was focused on software. I was focused on investments. It gave me a big advantage to start very young. There’s no question about it,” he explained.
According to the Times of India, Buffett began to explore investments at the age of 11 with $114.75 he had saved. He used this money to purchase three shares of the oil and gas company Cities Service (now known as Citgo).
Gates became a millionaire by the age of 20, thanks to the software company he founded with his high school friend Paul Allen. In contrast, Buffett had to wait until he was 32 before his net worth surpassed six figures.
Prioritizing and avoiding distractions. Having clear priorities has been essential for both Gates and Buffett. It helped them avoid wasting energy on projects that didn’t bring them closer to their goals. Gates told CNBC that he focused his entire life on a single project: Microsoft.
During his first 20 years at the helm of Microsoft, his routine revolved entirely around software development. He sacrificed weekends and vacations to achieve his goal of placing a personal computer in every home. “Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself,” Allen wrote for Vanity Fair.
Patience and long-term thinking. From a young age, Buffett chose to specialize in long-term investments, resisting the temptation for quick profits. Throughout his career, he concentrated on identifying solid companies and investing in them. He also held onto their shares for years or even decades, allowing time and compound interest to grow his wealth.
Buffett refers to this approach as “the snowball.” During Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in 1999, he humorously described his investment journey: “I started building this little snowball at the top of a very long hill. The trick to have a very long hill is either starting very young or living to be very old.”
Image | Razvan Chisu
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