Entitlement…

05/10/2010 in Featured Leave a reply

Entitlement – (noun) the fact of having a right to something.

I read this week where the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett has an old-world spiritual message for today’s money-rich parents: teach your children values and do not give them everything they want.

Peter Buffett is now traveling and telling his story as to how he wound up a “normal, happy” person instead of a spoiled child to one of the world’s richest people. He has written a book entitled “Life is What You Make it: Finding Your Own Path to Fulfillment”. He is teaching the rewards of self-respect and pursuing one’s own passions and accomplishments rather than buying into society’s concepts of material wealth.

“I am my own person and I know what I have accomplished in my life,” he said. “This isn’t about wealth or fame or money or any of that stuff, it is actually about values and what you enjoy and finding something you love doing.”

“Entitlement is the worst thing ever and I see entitlement coming in many guises,” he said. “Anybody who acts like they deserve something ‘just because,’, is a disaster.”

But Peter Buffett wasn’t always this wise. Even though his family gave him $90,000 in stock when he was 19, a small sum from such immense financial wealth. He refused to allow this to shape his life. After studying at Stanford University, he moved to San Francisco and lived in a studio apartment with just enough room for his musical instruments.

“I was really searching,” he said, adding that he began his musical career by working for free writing music for a local television station.

“I was kind of lost, but trying to find myself. It was definitely this strange period where I didn’t really know where I was going,” he said.

“I was not only not handed everything as a kid, I was shown that there are lots of other people out there with very different circumstances,” he said.

Peter has embarked on a “Concert & Conversation” tour in which he plays the piano, talks about his life and warns against a consumerist culture.

“Economic prosperity may come and go; that’s just how it is,” he writes in the book. “But values are the steady currency that earn us the all-important rewards.”