In 1999, Warren Buffett was asked what you should do to get as rich as him—his advice still applies today？

If you want to be as rich as Warren Buffett, don't wait to get started. That's the advice that the investing titan shared in 1999 at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders meeting when asked how to make $30 billion, which was roughly his net worth at the time.如果你想像沃伦·巴菲特一样富有，就不要等着开始。 这就是这位投资巨头在 1999 年伯克希尔哈撒韦年度股东大会上分享的建议，当时被问及如何赚到 300 亿美元，这大约是他当时的净资产。

The then-68-year-old Buffett — whose fortune has since grown to more than $100 billion — said that compound interest is an investor's best friend and compared building wealth through interest to rolling a snowball down a hill.时年 68 岁的巴菲特表示，复利是投资者最好的朋友，他将通过利息积累财富比作滚雪球。

"Start early," Buffett said. "I started building this little snowball at the top of a very long hill. The trick to have a very long hill is either starting very young or living to be very old."“早点开始，”巴菲特说。 “我开始在一座很长的山顶上建造这个小雪球。拥有一座很长的山丘的诀窍要么是从很小的时候开始，要么就是活到很老。”

The Oracle of Omaha said that if he were graduating from college in 1999 and had $10,000 to invest, he would be strategic about choosing where to put his money. "I probably would focus on smaller companies because I would be working with smaller sums and there's more chance that something is overlooked in that arena," Buffett explained, saying he would start examining companies alphabetically and work his way from there.奥马哈神谕说，如果他在 1999 年大学毕业并且有 10,000 美元可以投资，那么他会在选择把钱放在哪里时具有策略性。 巴菲特解释说：“我可能会专注于较小的公司，因为我会处理较小的金额，而且在那个领域更有可能忽略某些事情，”他说他将开始按字母顺序检查公司并从那里开始工作。

Investors, Buffett explained, need to fend for themselves and rely on their own knowledge and intuition when searching for promising businesses to invest in. He added that savvy investors would do best to "learn what you know and what you don't" and act "very vigorously" when they see something they consider to be a good opportunity.巴菲特解释说，投资者在寻找有前途的企业进行投资时，需要保护自己并依靠自己的知识和直觉。他补充说，精明的投资者会尽力“了解你所知道的和不知道的”并采取行动，当他们看到他们认为是一个很好的机会时，“非常积极”。

"You can't look around for people to agree with you," Buffett said of putting money into an investment. "You can't look around for people to even know what you're talking about."“你不能四处寻找同意你的人，”巴菲特谈到将钱投入投资时说。 “你不能环顾四周，人们甚至不知道你在说什么。”

That said, Buffett is also a staunch supporter of index funds, which hold every stock in an index, making them automatically persified. To build wealth, investors should "consistently buy an S&P 500 low-cost index fund," Buffett said in 2017. "Keep buying it through thick and thin, and especially through thin."也就是说，巴菲特也是指数基金的坚定支持者，指数基金持有指数中的每只股票，使其自动多元化。 巴菲特在 2017 年表示，为了积累财富，投资者应该“始终如一地购买标准普尔 500 指数低成本指数基金。”“不断购买。”

Still, Buffett said that aspiring to make $30 billion is unnecessary, and recently said that the size of his fortune is "incomprehensible."不过，巴菲特表示，雄心勃勃地赚 300 亿美元是不必要的，最近还表示，他的财富规模“令人费解”。

"The money makes very little difference after a moderate level," he said.“在中等水平之后，这笔钱几乎没有什么区别，”他说。

He continued: "If you asked me to trade away a very significant percentage of my net worth either for some extra years on my life or being able to do during those years what I want to do, I'd do it in a second."他继续说道：“如果你让我交易掉我净资产的很大一部分，要么在我的生命中多花几年，要么在那些年里能够做我想做的事，我会马上做。 ”