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- Todd Combs discussed his demanding mother, passion for investing, and willingness to take risks.
- He compared studying a business to being a detective, and touted his short seller's eye.
- Combs is one of Warren Buffett's two investment managers at Berkshire Hathaway.
Todd Combs spoke about his mother's sky-high expectations, the importance of taking risks, and the need for intense passion and ambition to achieve excellence.
Combs helps Warren Buffett manage Berkshire Hathaway's vast portfolio of stocks and other investments, and serves as CEO of Berkshire-owned Geico. He compared digging into a company to detective work, and underlined the value of having a short seller's eye when analyzing businesses. He made the comments during a recent episode of the "Art of Investing" podcast.
Here are Combs' 8 best quotes, lightly edited for length and clarity:
1. "My mother could have been a CEO in her own right. She didn't go to college because she didn't have an opportunity back then. So I think she wanted to channel all those missed opportunities in her life into mine. I'll never forget coming home one time with an A-, and I think I got grounded and all kinds of stuff. So she was very, very militant. She was the original tiger mom."
2. "It's super, super important to take a lot of risk when you're young. You've got nothing to lose at your age, you take the risk and you can massively screw up, and nobody's going to really hold it against you unless it's fraud or something like that. Take intelligent risk, don't take stupid risk."
3. "What do you do with a jigsaw puzzle? You dump out all the pieces and you start with the edges and the corners. You don't start in the middle and build your way out." (Exploring different fields and taking risks is a great way to make your mistakes early and find your passion, Combs said.)
4. "People usually rise to their level of complacency. If your dream is to make it to manager and you're perfectly fine there, that's pretty much where you're going to stop. That doesn't mean if you've got 10,000 people who all want to be CEO or whatever that they're all going to achieve it, but people create their own limiting factors."
5. "I have never really been ready for anything in my life. When people see things in you that you don't see in yourself, that's amazing. And that was true with Steve. That was certainly true with Charlie. That was true with Warren, multiple times with Warren for Berkshire."
6. "I'm like the detective that could show them the map and the terrain and tear it all apart. I'm like, 'Oh, yes, this is a total fraud,' and I'm triangulating all this stuff, putting the puzzle pieces together."
7. "Short selling is no different than long investing in my humble opinion. Very, very, very few people know what they're doing, it's very hard. You don't have a primary care physician go do brain surgery. I always felt you had to be about 80%, 85% correct on the short side to make money. You have to be damn, damn good, but that helps you on the long side if you don't become myopic or dogmatic or solve for the lazy narrative or any of that stuff." (Berkshire doesn't short but Combs finds his short-selling skills help him identify companies' weaknesses.)
8. "There's 1 million people that want to be Djokovic, or Tom Brady, or Steph Curry, or Warren Buffett. Grit and pushing yourself can go a long way. But in a world where 1 million people are trying to do this, if 0.1% of them just absolutely love it so passionately that they're going to bed thinking about it, they're waking up thinking about it, you're never going to be able to compete with that if you don't love it to your core."