MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 2 | 21
drive all of his future results.
The critical ideas of value investing, which
include the concept of viewing stocks as
nothing more than claim checks on an un-
derlying business, for which the investor
should always have a significant margin of
error, were almost all cribbed directly out of
Graham’s classes. In fact, it can be argued
that the only thing that Buffett really added
to the mix was the idea that it is better to
pay a reasonable price for a great business
than a great price for a mediocre one.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the man
who we most know as the greatest investor
alive owes nearly all of his massive success
to the mentoring that he received early in
his career.
Other famous examples of
mentorship
Another one of the richest people in Ameri-
ca is Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg started
his career at Salomon Brothers, a bank that
would later be bought by none other than
Warren Buffett. Bloomberg credits his time
under the bank’s president, William Salo-
mon, as the most formative years of his life.
Bloomberg has stated without a hint of exag-
geration that he learned more about busi-
ness from Bill Salomon than he had during
his entire time at Harvard Business School.
Bloomberg was eventually able to take the
lessons he learned from that mentoring and
branch off to form his own company.
Today, he is worth $55 billion, making him
one of the richest people in the world.
Bloomberg has said that without his time
under Salomon, it is unlikely that he ever
would have had developed the necessary
skills and confidence to form his own com-
pany.The power of mentorship is
real
So far, we’ve seen two cases where two of
the most successful businesspeople in the
world each unambiguously owe a great deal
of their success to the critical business men-
torship that they received early in their ca-
reers.But these are not cherry-picked examples.
The simple fact is that a glance down the
Forbes 400 list will yield case after case of
the world’s most successful business people
having succeeded, in part or in whole, based
on the mentoring that they received.The question is not whether mentoring
works or even whether it has been a crucial
component in the success of most of the
country’s top businesspeople. The answer to
both those questions is resoundingly affirm-
ative.The real question is how each entrepreneur
can find who their ideal teacher is and then
take the fullest possible advantage of the
knowledge that they impart. Ultimately, the
answer lies in each individual.