After 60 years at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett stepped down as the holding company’s CEO at the end of 2025.
Throughout his career, the business and investing icon routinely shared wisdom to help others build successful lives, from singing the praises of compound interest to offering a thought exercise for living without regrets.
At Berkshire Hathaway’s 2025 annual shareholder meeting, Buffett gave advice to those at the opposite end of their career as him: “Don’t worry too much about starting salaries and be very careful who you work for because you will take on the habits of the people around you,” he told the audience in response to a question about lessons he learned early on. “There are certain jobs you shouldn’t take.”
Though it may be tempting for workers just starting out to accept whichever job offers the most competitive salary they can find, Buffett emphasized that other factors may be more important over the course of your career.
‘Find people that are wonderful to work with’
While a good starting salary can help set you up for financial success, your coworkers and managers may play an outsized role in your long-term career success, Buffett said.
“Who you associate with is enormously important,” he said. “Don’t expect that you’ll make every decision right on that, but you are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends.”
He drew on his own experience of finding mentors who bestowed their wisdom upon him as a young person learning the ins and outs of running a business, and encouraged young people to find people in their own lives who have careers they admire and go work with them.
“I’ve had five bosses in life and I liked every one of them — they were all interesting. I still decided that I’d rather work for myself than anybody else,” Buffett said. “But if you find people that are wonderful to work with, that’s the place to go.”
Don’t do it for the money
In addition to surrounding yourself with smart and interesting people, Buffett said it’s wise to look for a job you would do even if you didn’t need the money. “I’ve had that for a very long time,” he added.
Not only has the 95-year-old made a lot of money throughout his career, but he has often shared how much he’s enjoyed his work and colleagues. “I get to do what I like to do with people that I love,” Buffett said in a 2008 interview.
He encouraged young people to find a similarly meaningful career.
“It’s interesting to me that in the investment business, so many people get out of it after they’ve made a pile of money,” he said at Berkshire’s shareholder meeting in 2025. “You really want something that you’ll stick around for whether you need the money or not.”
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