Warren Buffett teaches kids the basics of business and money: don't borrow, save, try again, and guard your good name.
Secret #1: try to learn from your mistakes - better yet, learn from the mistakes of others. That is the cheapest tuition in business.
Secret #2: think twice before borrowing or lending, especially to a friend. As the chapter puts it, the best way to pay back a debt is to never have one.
Secret #3: following your passion is the key to success. People do their best work at jobs they enjoy, and it rarely feels like a life sentence.
Secret #6: when you hit a roadblock, come up with alternate ways of doing things instead of quitting at the first dead end.
Secret #8, in the book's own words: failure is not falling down, it is staying down. A flop is an event, not who you are.
Secret #9: it takes years to build a reputation but only minutes to ruin it. Guard your good name like treasure.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFThis book is the companion to the animated TV series Secret Millionaires Club, in which Warren Buffett voices himself as the mentor of a group of school kids - Radley, Elena, Jones, Lisa, and Starty, their robot friend. The children dive into businesses and money problems, and Buffett helps them make sense of what happens. The book retells those lessons as 26 secrets, one per short chapter, and every principle in it was personally approved by Buffett as one he follows himself.
Each secret is stated plainly up front, explained in simple business terms, and then shown in action in a story from the show - with help, now and then, from Buffett's famous friends: Jay-Z, Shaquille O'Neal, Kelly Rowland, and Nick Cannon appear in the adventures, and even Bill Gates comes along on one. Buffett adds war stories and reflections from his own long career along the way.
