The author of this book, Robert Hagstrom, is the Chief Investment Strategist and Managing Director at Legg Mason Focus Capital..He is also one of America’s foremost experts on the investment philosophies of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. The reason I chose to discuss this book is that, through it, one can grasp a fundamental principle of wealth: to be an independent self.
Independence is a rare and precious quality. Yet in the eyes of most people, it seems to be a trait unrelated to wealth. However, as Hagstrom rightly points out:
“In a very real sense, independent thinking and self-actualization are the primary cornerstones of the money mind, because everything else flows from the resilient will they create.”
In this light, spiritual independence is not only the foundation of intellectual freedom, but also the key to financial freedom. “Becoming an independent self,” much like “being a friend to discomfort,” forms the bedrock of the natural laws of wealth.
I. The Evolution of Buffett
In the hearts of many Americans, Warren Buffett holds a special place. Just as everyone has their own Hamlet, everyone also has their own version of Buffett. In other words, Buffett is a figure who reveals new insights with each reading—each book about him feels like a fresh encounter. While many top performers across disciplines spend their lives honing their craft without fundamentally evolving, Buffett stands apart as someone who continuously transforms—decade after decade.
Thirty years ago, Buffett invested in Coca-Cola and made billions; today, his bet on Apple has earned him tens of billions. These iconic investments are not just milestones in Buffett’s financial success but also profound expressions of his evolving investment philosophy. For most people, their earliest impressions of Buffett tend to be tied to Coca-Cola.
Speaking personally, my understanding of Buffett’s investment in Coca-Cola went through three distinct phases. Like many others, I initially saw Coca-Cola as a high-margin, consumer-facing product, much like Patrón—one with stable, predictable demand. In the second stage, I realized Coca-Cola’s other strengths: its addictive qualities and high consumption frequency. In the third stage, I came to see it as a near-monopoly business—one with pricing power that is exercised with restraint, minimal after-sales service, and thus, lower operational costs and reduced exposure to business risk and uncertainty.
But it wasn’t until I read Warren Buffett: The Ultimate Money Mind that I discovered the deeper reason behind Buffett’s decision to invest in Coca-Cola—none of the above factors were the core of it.
His Coca-Cola investment marked a turning point: a moment of philosophical maturity in his investment journey, and a milestone in his evolving understanding of wealth itself. This lesser-known arc of transformation—how Buffett’s financial mind was forged and refined over time—is concisely mapped out in the book as a journey through three distinct stages.
Stage One: The Young Buffett
The first phase of Buffett’s evolution is what we might call “The Young Buffett.”
This stage featured a critical turning point—but it wasn’t his admission to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Though Wharton remains the world’s top business school to this day, for the young Buffett, its teachings were far too elementary. He was far too independent-minded, already a formidable self-learner with little regard for institutional prestige. In fact, in pursuit of a more self-directed education, he transferred out, returning to his hometown of Omaha to enroll at the little-known University of Nebraska.
The real inflection point in Buffett’s early development came when he encountered the legendary investor Benjamin Graham. In 1950, after reading Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, Buffett was deeply inspired. He resolved to study under Graham at Columbia University, where he succeeded brilliantly and formed the foundation of his first investment system.
Graham’s core philosophy centered around building the value of a partnership’s assets. His approach was simple but powerful: if a company’s net assets (after liabilities) appeared cheap relative to its share price, you bought; if not, you passed. This method later became known as “cigar-butt investing”—the idea being to pick up discarded businesses that still had one or two good puffs left. It was the purest form of classic value investing.
In the spring of 1956, Buffett returned to Omaha to launch his own investment partnership, serving as the general partner. Following Graham’s playbook, Buffett delivered spectacular results over the next twelve years. In 1968, his partnership posted a 59% return, compared to an 8% rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average—his strongest annual performance during that era.
And yet, following Graham’s logic strictly, Buffett would never have bought Coca-Cola. Or Apple, for that matter. These companies were never deeply undervalued over long periods. Under the strict rules of value investing, they simply wouldn’t have made the cut.
Stage Two: The Developing Buffett
In 1969, at the height of his early investment success, Buffett made the surprising decision to walk away. Why? Because he believed the market no longer offered enough undervalued “cigar-butt” stocks to justify his approach. After all, Benjamin Graham—the man who shaped Buffett’s early worldview—had taught him that the most important principle in investing was the margin of safety. Graham’s investment philosophy revolved around quantifiable facts and disciplined methodology. It was a rigorously rational framework built on exploiting clear market mispricings.
But Buffett began to wonder: If you only ever focus on the market’s mistakes, might you miss out on its greatest opportunities? Coca-Cola, for instance.
Founded in 1886 and listed publicly in 1919, Coca-Cola was part of Buffett’s life even in his boyhood, when he sold bottles on the streets of Omaha for pocket money. Yet, during all the years he ran his investment partnership, he never once bought Coca-Cola stock. When Berkshire Hathaway finally began acquiring shares in 1988, the dividend yield was just 6.6%—lower than the 9% yield on U.S. Treasuries at the time. To die-hard Graham-style value investors, this move was nothing short of heresy. “Buffett has betrayed his teacher!” many cried.
But this was, in fact, the very moment when Buffett broke free from the limitations of his past success. His money mind had evolved, ushering in a new phase: The Developing Buffett. In this second stage, he no longer evaluated businesses through the rigid lens of undervaluation alone. He was now willing to accept the market’s consensus price, even pay what seemed like a slight premium—if the business had durable competitive advantages and long-term growth potential.
Within just 10 months of his first Coca-Cola purchase, Buffett had invested $1.023 billion to acquire 93.4 million shares at an average price of $10.96 per share. By the end of 1989, Coca-Cola made up 35% of Berkshire’s equity portfolio—his most concentrated position ever.
To Graham, such focus on the future would have been dangerously speculative. “The word speculation,” he once wrote, “derives from the idea of looking ahead.” But Buffett eventually came to revise this narrow view. He realized that Graham’s skepticism toward the future had limitations. Reflecting on his own missteps, Buffett admitted:
“Investing with a short-term mindset in farm equipment makers, third-rate department stores, or New England textile mills brought me economic punishment for my mistakes.”
The lesson? Buying just because something is cheap is speculation. Investing in the future is the real investment.
Buffett would later explain that the best businesses are those that can maintain high returns on capital without requiring significant reinvestment. Ten years after Berkshire's Coca-Cola investment, the company’s market cap had surged from $25.8 billion to $143 billion. Over that decade, Coke generated $26.9 billion in earnings, paid out $10.5 billion in dividends, and reinvested $16.4 billion into its operations. Remarkably, every dollar the company retained had created $7.20 in market value.
By the end of 1999, Berkshire’s original $1.023 billion stake in Coca-Cola had grown to $11.6 billion. For comparison, that same investment in the S&P 500 would have yielded only $3 billion.
Thus, Buffett’s journey from Phase One to Phase Two marked a profound shift: from a focus on valuation to a focus on growth. It was an intellectual and emotional leap—not merely a shift in tactics, but a bold decision to abandon even successful beliefs that no longer served him.
Graham had always emphasized intrinsic value and avoided forecasts of future growth. His formula was designed to be conservative and seemingly safer. And yes, the “cigar-butt” strategy of young Buffett could still generate profits. But even in the face of success, Buffett never stopped reviewing, reflecting, and evolving.
What enabled this transformation? The book points to two traits that had defined Buffett since youth: a relentless hunger for learning, and the courage to act.
In 1992, at age 62, Buffett publicly declared that he had moved beyond Graham’s investment model. With that, he fully stepped out of his mentor’s shadow. Buffett later remarked:
“Ninety-nine percent of my wealth was earned after I turned 60.”
This statement speaks not only to the power of long-term thinking and compounding, but also to how hard—and how rare—it is to truly outgrow others’ influences and become an independent thinker.
Stage Three: The Mature Buffett
By this point in the story, one natural question arises: If the second stage of Buffett’s value investing journey was about embracing growth, then how exactly should we evaluate that growth? This brings us to Stage Three—the “Mature Buffett”—and his evolving framework for understanding value in a changing world.
To answer that, we must return to the question of capital itself—because true growth cannot be understood without understanding the capital it consumes.
“Setting price aside,” Buffett once wrote, “the best businesses are those that, over time, require little incremental capital to grow yet consistently generate high returns.” The flip side is also true: “A bad business either already suffers—or will inevitably suffer—from the opposite: needing ever more capital to produce ever lower returns.”
Experience has shown that even companies with high P/E ratios and rapid growth can be outstanding value investments—if their return on capital exceeds their cost of capital. That was precisely why Buffett invested in Coca-Cola. Another striking example was Dell: its direct-to-consumer model made it not only faster and more efficient than competitors, but also one of the first companies in history to achieve a return on capital exceeding 100%—peaking at an astonishing 229%.
During the 1980s, a shift began to take place in American business. Tangible assets—land, factories, and equipment—gradually gave way to investments in intangible assets such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, and brand equity. By the mid-1990s, investment in intangible assets was growing faster than in tangible ones. As one study observed, “The investment rate in intangibles by U.S. corporations is now roughly double that of tangibles—and still rising.”
Eventually, this transformation became even more dramatic: “The capital requirements of business models dropped sharply, while their ability to generate value scaled exponentially.” Many modern companies began creating billions in market capitalization while deploying only a fraction of the capital once needed in the industrial age. This was the immense leverage of the internet and digital economy.
Buffett understood this shift. He recognized that the best long-term businesses tend to possess a quality he called “economic franchise.” A franchise business sells a product or service that people deeply need or want, and for which no close substitute exists. He even predicted that the next wave of wealth would belong to those who could identify the new holders of such franchises.
It was this realization that led the famously “tech-averse” Buffett to buy Apple stock in 2016—an investment he had once dismissed as outside his circle of competence.
Complexity economics and empirical data have shown that accelerating returns are most often found in technology sectors with strong network effects. And Buffett—armed not with abstract equations but with real-world, hands-on experience—ultimately outperformed many theoretical finance models. He beat the quants with practice, not prediction.
Stage Four: The Complete Buffett
Ironically, at the very peak of his investing evolution, Buffett seemed to return to something simpler—not in sophistication, but in clarity. By the time he reached what we might call the “Complete Buffett,” he had abandoned not only market timing, but also most of modern financial theory.
He ignored short-term forecasts and market fluctuations, and instead focused entirely on the long-term economics of the business itself—especially its reinvestment needs and cash-generating power. This philosophy came to be known as “business-driven investing,” underpinned by four guiding principles: business criteria, financial criteria, market criteria, and management criteria.
1.Business Criteria
Buffett avoids “turnaround” situations or distressed plays. Instead, he invests only in businesses with sound long-term prospects, ideally those with economic franchises—companies whose products are deeply desired and hard to replace.
2.Financial Criteria
Buffett warns against being misled by pre-interest, pre-tax, or pre-depreciation earnings. His preferred yardstick is Return on Equity (ROE), which he sees as the best measure of managerial effectiveness. He looks for companies that generate strong returns on capital while needing little reinvestment.
3.Market Criteria
Unlike academic finance, Buffett rejects models like the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). He anchors valuation to the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield—his proxy for a “risk-free” rate—and adjusts for the business’s certainty. Using the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model, he estimates a company’s intrinsic value by projecting future cash flows and discounting them back to the present, much like valuing a rental property by calculating the sum of its future rents.
4.Management Criteria
Buffett is skeptical of management teams that either expand recklessly or return capital too aggressively. He believes the core task of a business is capital allocation—putting profits to work in high-return projects. He favors leaders who resist industry inertia, think independently, and act rationally. To Buffett, short-term stock prices are noise, not signals. He has often remarked that the investment techniques taught in most business schools are more likely to distance people from real wealth than bring them closer to it.
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II. The Thinkers Behind Buffett—and the Philosophies That Shaped Him
In Part I, we briefly retraced the evolution of Buffett’s investment philosophy. From that journey, we can see that Buffett is a man of autodidactic spirit and bold experimentation—someone who learns relentlessly and acts decisively. Yet he is equally eager to absorb wisdom from those around him—family, academic mentors, market veterans, and business partners. While this chapter’s core wealth principle is “independence,” one cannot truly become independent without first learning from the best and integrating their insights into a coherent, repeatable system. So in this part, we will review the key figures who once guided Buffett—and the foundational values that helped build his enduring investment ideology.
First, credit for shaping Buffett’s worldview and values goes to his father, Howard Buffett.
Politically, Howard was considered part of the “Old Right” within the Republican Party—staunchly opposed to foreign military interventions and most forms of government interference. He was also a close friend of Murray Rothbard, a prominent figure in the Austrian School of Economics. These ideological roots deeply influenced Buffett’s beliefs in free markets and personal responsibility. Understanding this intellectual lineage can help explain why Buffett would later openly support figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
But this isn’t the central point. More crucial is the value tied to classical liberalism: independence. Under his father’s influence, Buffett developed an early admiration for the American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was hailed as “the spiritual teacher of a generation” and once dubbed “the father of American civilization” by President Lincoln. His seminal work Nature was considered the “Bible” of New England Transcendentalism. Emerson emphasized the individual’s independence and self-actualization. He believed that true freedom does not lie in external wealth or status, but in inner autonomy and self-mastery. This emphasis on individual agency forms the philosophical bedrock of Buffett’s investment worldview.
On the topic of independence, Emerson left us with two enduring maxims. The first, from Self-Reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” The second, from The American Scholar: “Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree... to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater to the common stock.” These two insights reflect the dual dimensions of independence: first, the cultivation of quiet introspection and psychological growth; second, the internal conviction to challenge convention and create breakthroughs. As the book summarizes: “Independent thinking and self-actualization are defining traits of the financially intelligent mind, requiring both detachment and reflection.”
But achieving both is extraordinarily difficult. To possess the money mind requires not only intellectual independence but the inner fortitude to withstand society’s disdain for nonconformists. Financial intelligence enhances confidence, but also maintains rationality amid the fear and greed of the markets.
Emerson, as a champion of individualism, believed that institutions tend to corrode human nature, and that only through self-cultivation can one achieve spiritual wholeness independent of external forces. Buffett has lived out this philosophy of embracing solitude. He doesn’t follow trends, is unmoved by Wall Street noise, and chose to live in Omaha, far from the market’s frenzy. This allowed him to sidestep both the 2000 tech bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. As Emerson said, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” Buffett exemplifies this spirit to the extreme—even refusing to look at CEOs’ photos, believing they might interfere with his investment judgment.
Next comes the figure we all know well: Benjamin Graham.
Graham’s influence on Buffett is impossible to overstate. He was Buffett’s most important mentor during his formative years—someone Buffett revered as an investment master. Yet most writings on Graham focus solely on his investment techniques. Warren Buffett: The Ultimate Money Mind, however, traces Graham’s roots to Stoicism—a school of philosophy born in Ancient Greece and now resurgent in the modern West. Many prominent figures—from Antifragile author Nassim Taleb to Silicon Valley founders—are devout followers of this philosophy.
Interestingly, Emerson also deeply influenced Graham. This shared intellectual ancestry helped forge the bond between Graham and Buffett. Buffett once said: “Graham wasn’t influenced by what others thought, nor did he care what the world might say tomorrow.”
Still, Emerson’s idea of independence served as the soil in which Buffett’s mind first took root. It was Graham who then grafted onto it the classical wisdom of Ancient Greece and Rome—especially the Stoic tradition, exemplified in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
Emerson and Marcus Aurelius are also philosophically aligned. Emerson believed that “nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles,” stressing the power of reason and natural law. Similarly, Stoicism describes a state of rational tranquility—free from pain, anxiety, and preoccupation with what we cannot control. Janet Lowe, in The Classic Graham, notes that Graham “incorporated Stoicism into his personal philosophy.”
Stoicism teaches that while we cannot control external circumstances, we can control our responses to them. Epictetus, a leading Stoic, once said: “It’s not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of them.” Graham’s three most critical concepts—Mr. Market, margin of safety, and intrinsic value—are rooted in this philosophy. Mr. Market is wildly emotional: euphoric one day, gloomy the next. These mood swings are unavoidable. But by maintaining a Stoic indifference, investors can remain unshaken. Concepts like “margin of safety” and “intrinsic value” serve as tools to withstand Mr. Market’s irrationality.
By accepting the uncontrollability of market fluctuations and focusing instead on a company’s intrinsic worth, Buffett, under Graham’s influence, honed his ability to think independently and actualize his vision—eventually surpassing even his teacher.
While Emerson focused on awakening individual autonomy, Stoicism emphasized inner calm, acceptance of fate, equality, cosmopolitanism, and inner peace. Buffett’s lifestyle embodies this Stoic philosophy. He exercises restraint over material desires, channeling his energy into investment and philanthropy—areas where he has become a master.
Finally, we come to the last key figure in Buffett’s evolution: Charlie Munger.
Buffett’s father admired Emerson—this became the “hidden key” linking Graham and Buffett’s values. History has its fascinating coincidences. According to The Ultimate Money Mind, Buffett was initially drawn to Munger because he reminded him of Graham. Both men were staunchly committed to independent thought and were known for their integrity and unwavering realism.
Munger once said that “maintaining as much rationality as possible is a moral duty.” This reflects the first principle of wealth: the ultimate goal of being an independent self is absolute rationality.
At a dinner event, Munger was asked to name the one quality that most contributed to his success. His reply was succinct: “I’m rational. That’s the answer. I’m rational.” He added, “If you claim to be rational, you should understand how things work, what works and what doesn’t, and why.”
The good news is that rationality can be learned. Munger said: “Becoming more rational isn’t optional.” The implication is clear: you must do it. “It’s a long process. You gain it gradually. The results aren’t guaranteed. But there’s hardly anything more important.”
But how does one become more rational?
The answer: worldly wisdom. This intellectual habit, famously associated with the self-taught Benjamin Franklin, was brought to full bloom by Munger through investment success. Munger developed this “worldly wisdom” by studying mental models from multiple disciplines. He once said, “The art of stock picking is just a subset of the art of worldly wisdom.”
Graham was more of a rationalist. His approach was mathematical—based on self-evident truths. His valuation models relied on a priori reasoning, not practical experience. Thus, Graham preferred cheap “cigar butt” stocks. Data could be studied, not sensed.
For Munger, truth came from observable facts and personal experience. These offered empirical evidence for knowledge. He evaluated businesses holistically, not just based on cheapness.
Munger’s thinking helped Buffett evolve beyond Graham’s logical frameworks. Buffett once said: “Charlie gave me the blueprint: Don’t buy fair businesses at wonderful prices; buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.” Actually owning businesses transformed Buffett’s understanding of investing. He once reflected: “Being an entrepreneur made me a better investor; being an investor made me a better entrepreneur.”
In Munger’s view, both worldly wisdom and empiricism matter. Studying failure helps avoid repeated mistakes. Independence allows one to resist illogic and psychological biases. Rationalism offers the safety margin to control risk, while empiricism helps assess a company’s future cash flow. In Munger, the independent spirit embraces both prior knowledge and experience—and sees the full value in their synthesis.
Thus, Buffett’s independent spirit evolved: from transcendence, to embracing rationalism, and finally to an integration with experience. And these three dimensions—beautifully—found harmony in him.
So, what was the ultimate force that unlocked Buffett’s “inner meridians”?
It was Munger’s final philosophical weapon: pragmatism.
At the 2010 Berkshire annual meeting, someone asked Munger about his life philosophy. His answer was surprising: not rationality—but pragmatism. This idea was first proposed by American philosopher William James, who described rationalists as “tender-minded” and empiricists as “tough-minded.” Pragmatism not only bridges rationalism and empiricism, but also fuses them into a cohesive system. Pragmatism is robust: when tech stocks soared, Buffett’s pragmatic response was “if I don’t understand it, I won’t buy it,” thus avoiding the dot-com bust. But pragmatism is also dynamic—once he grasped the business model of Apple, Buffett made it his top holding, netting over $100 billion in profit.
Yes—when you confront market noise with Emerson’s independence, regulate emotions with Stoic reason, organize knowledge through Franklin’s wisdom, and grasp reality through James’s pragmatism—you may come to see:
True wealth begins with becoming an independent version of yourself.
III. How to Become a Truly Independent Self
At this point, some may wonder: what is the core methodology behind Warren Buffett’s emphasis on “being an independent self”? In this book, author Robert Hagstrom summarizes several key principles. In my view, these principles are not only applicable to investing but are equally valuable for anyone striving for personal growth and self-improvement.
The first principle is learning. Like Buffett, one must continue evolving through constant study and reflection, all while maintaining intellectual independence. Buffett's ability to remain true to himself is inseparable from his lifelong devotion to learning and the wisdom he inherited through it. He has always been an avid reader, and many of the formative influences in his life—his father, mentors, and partners—are deeply tied to reading. Reading has played an irreplaceable role in shaping his worldview. One of the earliest examples comes from a book he read at age 11 titled One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. It offered advice like:
“Read every book you can find on the subject. Learn from the experiences of others in the field you plan to enter. Absorb those lessons into your own plan, and then go out and act—this way, you’re standing on the shoulders of giants, starting from a higher ground.”
The book also said:
“The first step in starting your own business is to get informed… so read every publication related to the industry you want to enter.”
In other words, it’s not just about learning from books, but also from mistakes. One must continually reflect on cognitive errors and misjudgments, and learn through trial and correction in practice. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, when “the world lashes you with its displeasure,” a nonconformist must “know how to respond.”
According to Philip Fisher, while most people trying to evolve eventually fail, Buffett did not—because he remained true to himself. He never forgot who he was or where he was going. Staying independent and committing to lifelong learning go hand in hand.
The second principle is action— specifically, “striking the right balance between self-education and knowing when to act.” In other words, learning must be followed by action, and success often lies in seizing the right moment. It was this combination of learning-by-doing that shaped Buffett. As the saying goes, “the child is father to the man.” Buffett’s exceptional aptitude was already visible in his youth. From the age of six, when he started selling gum and soft drinks, he became his own boss. His early passion for business allowed him to build wealth from a young age and develop a keen market insight and independent economic thinking. These experiences taught him how to create value through personal effort and laid a solid foundation for his future in investing. They also allowed him to evaluate investment opportunities with both sharp intuition and grounded judgment. By the time he graduated high school at age 16, he was already the wealthiest teenager in Omaha—possibly the richest self-made youth in the world.
The book Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind argues that behind Buffett’s actions lies a deeper layer of philosophical and civilizational grounding. The word “pragmatism” comes from a Greek root meaning “action.” According to this school of thought, our beliefs are essentially rules for taking action—thus possessing a kind of “practical wisdom.” As the book says,
“If a belief helps get us from one place to another, then it has ‘cash value.’ Truth becomes a verb, not a noun.”
Finally, one must understand that independence also requires taking full responsibility for oneself, including one’s personal brand and reputation. Buffett’s father, Howard Buffett, instilled this in his children:
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
This deep respect for integrity and reputation became a guiding principle throughout Buffett’s life and career. What most impressed Buffett’s mentor Philip Fisher was that, even as Buffett refined and evolved his investment method, he never abandoned his core principles—principles that include honesty, maintaining a distinct investment temperament, and adhering to a margin of safety. Therefore, as the book concludes, those who possess a “money mind” are fundamentally kind. Their strengthened virtues—discretion in speech, clarity of thought, and a hunger for learning—help shape a temperament suited for long-term investing. It is their inner moral character that defines the “money mind.” With faith in capital markets, a vision for future financial returns, and generosity and sincerity toward their partners, shareholders, and clients, they press ever forward.
To close, I leave you with a passage from Emerson on the nature of independence—a quote Buffett shared with his son:
“Our independence is not of things, but of spirit. That is to say, we must rise from the material to the spiritual. When the world conspires to harass and entangle you with trivialities, when everyone knocks at your door and says, ‘Come with us,’ do not be tempted; do not join in their clamor. Hold fast to your own self-reliance, unshaken by the noise around you. Only then can your soul find peace, and only then will you live a truly independent life.”
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