The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Before telling the story of Warren Buffett's life, it's worth understanding the image that gives the book its name. He often compares his own path to a snowball that only really grows when two things come together: wet snow, which sticks, and a very long hill, so it can roll for a long time without stopping. Money that earns returns on what it already earned, the effect of compound interest, behaves the same way: at first the gain is small and unexciting, but after decades rolling downhill the result gets enormous.

This logic explains one of the author's choices: instead of starting on Wall Street, she starts with his childhood in Omaha, a small city in the American heartland. If the fortune were just market luck, it would be enough to tell about the best years in the stock market. Since the book's argument is that time weighs more than any isolated stroke of talent, it makes sense to devote a good part of the pages to a boy who, long before any valuable stock, was already thinking about how to put his own money to work early.

Warren Buffett was born in 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Howard Buffett, who worked in investments and later held political office. The family wasn't rich, but the basics weren't lacking either, even with the whole country feeling the weight of the Great Depression in those years. Growing up hearing talk about stocks and about being careful with money, at a time when so many people around him were losing everything, left a strong mark on him from an early age.

The book insists on a trait that seems almost like temperament rather than teaching: from the time he was very small, Buffett counted coins, saved his change and wrote down numbers just for the pleasure of watching them grow, like a game the other kids on the street didn't quite understand. That personal fascination with accumulating little by little became a lifelong habit: treating every cent as the seed of something bigger, not as disposable change in a pocket.

While still little, he was already selling chewing gum and bottles of soda door to door around the neighborhood, saving every cent of profit instead of spending it right away. Later, when he got a bit older, he started delivering newspapers early in the morning, taking on several routes at once instead of settling for just one, always calculating how much was left at the end of the month.

He was still a boy when he bought his first stocks with money he had saved up on his own. The price dropped soon after, he got anxious, waited for it to climb a little and sold as soon as he broke even with a small profit, only to watch the same stock keep rising far more after that. The lesson wasn't about picking the right stock, it was about patience: selling too early out of anxiety is expensive.