Yesterday Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were on stage together again. Through more than 50 years the two of them have answered questions from the audience and the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. There has been many good questions, and we found one that you might find interesting from the older days:

At the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting in 1999, Warren Buffett was asked: How can I make $30 billion?

He answered as follows:

"Start young!

Charlie has always said the big thing about it is we started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill. So we started at a very early age rolling the snowball down, and of course the nature of compound interest behaves like the snowball, with sticky snow and so on.

And the trick is to have a very long hill which means either starting very young or living to be very old.

If I were going out of school today and I had $10,000 to invest, I'd start with the companies starting with the letter A, and I would start going right through companies.

And I would probably focus on smaller companies, because I would be working with smaller sums, and there's more chance that something is overlooked.

And as Charlie has said, it wont be like doing it in 1951 when you could go through and find all kinds of things that just leaped off the page. But that's the only way to do it. Go through them one by one.

You have to buy businesses. Or little pieces of businesses called stocks, and you have to buy them at attractive prices, and you have to buy into good businesses. And that advice will be the same a hundred years from now, in terms of investing. That's what it's all about.

And you can't expect anybody else to di it for you. I mean, people will not tell you about wonderful little investments. It's not the way the investment business is set up.

When I first visited GEICO in January 1951, I went back to Columbia. And for the rest of the year I subsequently went back to Blythe & Company, and, actually, to one other firm that was a leading analyst in insurance - Geyer & Company. And I thought I'd discovered this wonderful thing and I saw what these great investment houses that specialized in insurance stocks said, and they said I didn't know what I was talking about.

You know, it wasn't of any interest to them.

You've got to follow your own way, you've got to learn what you know and what you don't know. Within the arena of what you know, you have to pursue it very vigorously and act on it when you find it.

And you can't look around for people to agree with you. You can't look around for people to even know what you're even talking about. You know, you have to think for yourself. And if you do, you'll find things."

How much do you need to invest in order to get an extra paid day off?

Indeed, if you find a good investment, it can start paying for a few of your extra holidays! Read our article on what we mean by that here!