Bill Gates’s father once asked his son and Warren Buffett to write down the word that explained their success. As Buffett later told the basketball player LeBron James, both men chose the same word: “Focus.” Jeff Benedict, who recounts the story in his recent biography of James, writes: “Gates [junior] believed that the thing you did obsessively between ages 13 and 18 was the thing you had the most chance of being world-class at.” For the teenaged Gates — and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk — that thing was writing software. For Buffett, it was investing, albeit that he started well before 13: at seven, he had asked Father Christmas for a book on bonds. For Martha Argerich, from age three, it was the piano. James’s thing was basketball.
The moral here is a familiar one, which will have been endlessly retold in this spring’s American graduation ceremonies: find your vocation, “pursue your passion”, and ride it to fame and riches. Certainly, the vocational route works for some. However, there are two kinds of career success, and the opportunistic route delivers more reliably. The best-paid industries — finance, law, tech, consulting — are mostly (though not entirely) populated by hard-working, ambitious people who don’t have a vocation.
There’s something beautiful about people with a vocation. My best friend in childhood never seemed particularly clever. But when we were about 18, he gave me a fascinating, impromptu late-night lecture on Vermeer and the artistic forger Han van Meegeren, and I realised: “Hang on, he knows this stuff.” Today he’s an art dealer. It’s the only job he’s ever had.