Warren Buffett allowed Ndamukong Suh to shadow him for several weeks. The NFL star shared his 3 key takeaways.
- NFL star Ndamukong Suh shadowed Warren Buffett for several weeks in 2010.
- The Tampa Bay Buccaneers player said every meeting was 100 times more valuable than an MBA.
- Suh's main takeaways were to keep things simple, focus on passions and people, and stay curious.
Warren Buffett allowed Ndamukong Suh to shadow him for several weeks in 2010. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers star told the story of how he landed the gig and detailed his three main takeaways in a recent Twitter thread.
Buffett was an honorary captain during Suh's senior game at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. The famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO stopped by the locker room to greet the players, including Suh. The future NFL player tweeted that their two-second meeting changed his life and his "entire world would be different if it hadn't happened."
Suh asked Tom Osborne, UNL's athletic director and a former congressman, to set up a meeting between him and Buffett. The investor hosted Suh at Berkshire's headquarters a few months later and happily consented to Suh shadowing him.
The defensive linesman was able to join several of Buffett's meetings as a result. He had a front-row seat to the investor crafting a deal with 3G Capital - a Brazilian private-equity group and Berkshire's partner on the Kraft-Heinz merger a few years later.
"Each time we met was a masterclass worth 100x more than an MBA," Suh tweeted about his time with Buffett.
The football player took three key lessons from the billionaire that have underpinned his approach to business and investing ever since. Those were to keep things simple, focus on passions and people, and always read, learn, and remain curious about the world.
The 6-foot-4 305-pound lineman also joked about his staged arm-wrestling matches with Buffett in recent years.
"No matter how many times we do it, I still can't beat him," he tweeted. "Must be all that Coca-Cola."
Suh told CNBC in January he tried to catch up with Buffett every quarter, as he's gearing up for an investing career after he retires from football and wants his mentor's advice.