Began reading The Warren Buffett Shareholder today.
This is from the preface.
Many contributors to this book remark upon Buffetts’s distinctive teaching style, which tends to instruct people how to think rather than what to think.
And
John Bogle has attended one Meeting, but attests that even one can change your world.
A couple of pages later
Our premise was that Berkshire’s intrinsic value owes a lot to the Meeting and the shareholder community.
Buffett wrote in his 2014 letter …… This culture grows stronger every year, and it will remain intact long after Charlie and I have left the scene.
Berkshire Hathaway has created a culture of intelligence, inquisitivness, integrity and learning. This culture is part of the “company” in both the corporate meaning of that word and in its sense as a society of people coming together (com) to break bread (pan).
Replace Warren with Kushal, Berkshire with the DGPLUG IRC channel and the shareholder meeting with the Summer Training.
And, nothing changes.
Amidst all the shouting and the craziness, that is the channel generally, it all goes up a hundredfold when the training happens.
Tempers flare. The kids are unruly. Mayhem ensues.
Yet, it all settles down soon enough.
Folks learn earnestly.
Wisdom is shared.
Bonds are made. Friendships built.
Across time and space.
And the Atlas who holds this little world on his shoulders is Kushal.
It is he, who literally, wrote the book on what we learn.
It is he, who pays for and maintains much of the infrastructure we need.
It is he, who conducts quite a few of the topics we learn.
It is he, who bribes, and cajoles old mages to come share their wisdom, with callow, inexperienced youth.
And it is he, who keeps this little corner of the world, warm and cozy and friendly, year after year after year.
The number of folks who owe their careers to him are many.
And the folks who have their lives changed by the training, many more still.
I don’t remember if I ever said this to him, but he has given more to humanity in ten years, what others haven’t in their entire lives.
And somewhere in the middle of the chapter, I found what succintly summarises the way I feel about the Summer Training.
And amid their decades of lessons, they get to the core message of all shareholders at the Berkshire Annual Meeting: if you’ve never been, go; if you always go, keep going.