Warren Buffet famously said that if someone wants to improve their net worth by 50%, improve their communication.
Here are some words from Brian Morgan. It’s from a Linkedin post here
“I’ve been reflecting: he didn’t say (but I will) that there is an inherent criticism of academics, media, and business, in the statement.
He seems to be indicating (correctly, I believe) that our current level of communicating our ideas is suboptimal to the idea. And if we were to take on the task of communicating better, we would improve the outcomes inherent in the idea—which already exists. He didn’t say we lacked ideas. We lacked their communication.
It made me think: we have too low a bar for acceptable writing in our society. And it costs us, yes in business—which is where our company focuses—but also: it simply costs us—as a people.
The professional writer—in the newspaper or on TV is paid by subscribers and advertisers. They are not paid to solve problems or even highlight or investigate sufficient solutions. Understand: if they get more eyeballs about “how government misdirection about masks led to three deaths” they will spend more time on that than “why the government changed their minds about masks.”
They are incentivized to keep you watching, not keep you informed.
This emotionally compelling, but not always credibly useful language becomes the noisy backdrop of society. Throw into that that college adjuncts are underpaid and told to “just teach grammar” ignoring, too often, a discussion about what makes an idea credible— we create a societal gap between the quality of who we are and our ability to communicate who we are. So, the lack of communication and investigation ends up in our businesses—employees who write reports through marketers, through “thought leaders.” If we do not know how a credible thought moves, “thought leadership” is a misnomer. It is neither thoughtful nor leadership.
More noise.”
If you want to grow your net worth, could improving your communication make such a difference?
In the world of helping people make better financial decisions, I am drawn to the problem of people seeing rather than looking…even better, watching. The financial salespeople produce graphs about performance, to make you feel good. But are they of value? The financial salespeople talk about performance and even outperformance, but are they incentivised to perform or just sell their funds and services? It is massively hard for anyone to interpret what is marketing and what is value. Of course, you have to be interested in knowing. You have to want to watch more deeply than see.
Like most people, you want to care about how your money is allocated for your future and your family’s future but those aims can get lost in the noise. If you can find a way to look through the marketing and incentivisation, perhaps Warren Buffet is right, you can improve your net worth by 50%.