8 Strategies for Women from Warren Buffett, the Feminist Capitalist

1) Invest in your own expertise. Find a niche and focus on it. Buffett would agree with a statistic from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Doris Christopher was 34 years old when she invested $3,000 to start Pampered Chef in her basement in 1980. Over the next 20 years she invested thousands of hours developing a distribution network through home party sales before selling the company to Buffett for a cool three-quarters of a billion dollars. Over those two decades, she’d invested far more than 10,000 hours. Bill Gates, a close friend and board member of Buffett’s, had the good fortune to be in eighth grade at a school that acquired an extremely rare item at the time — a computer. It became his obsession. Seven years later, he quit Harvard in his sophomore year to start his own company. By then, he’d invested far more than 10,000 hours. Buffett himself started at an even earlier age, making his first investment while in fifth grade. He made his first million by the age of 30, after investing more than 10,000 hours building his skill.