Warren Buffett is worth over $100 billion.
But if you ask him what the single best investment he ever made was, he won’t point to a stock pick or a business acquisition. He’ll point to a $100 Dale Carnegie course.
The story is more instructive than it first appears — and it has everything to do with what Reliance College is building.
Fear Won the First Round
As a young man, Buffett was terrified of public speaking. Not mildly uncomfortable — terrified. He’d rearrange his class schedule at the University of Nebraska specifically to avoid any course that required him to speak in front of others.
When he entered the securities business, he knew he couldn’t keep hiding. He saw an ad for a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, sat down, and wrote a check.
Then he stopped payment on it.
Fear won the first round. But not the second. He found another course, walked in with $100 cash, and committed before he could talk himself out of it. That decision — made in spite of fear, with nothing but conviction and pocket money — rewired the trajectory of his career.
What the Course Actually Taught Him
It wasn’t a formula for picking stocks. It wasn’t a management framework or a negotiation tactic.
It was communication — how to speak clearly, how to write persuasively, how to organize your thoughts so that other people could follow them — and be moved by them.
Buffett has shared this lesson with students for decades:
“If you improve your communication skills, I guarantee you’ll earn 50% more over your lifetime.”
He even keeps the Dale Carnegie certificate displayed prominently in his office — not his degrees, not his honorary awards. The certificate from a $100 course he almost didn’t take.
Why? Because he understands something that most of our educational institutions have forgotten: the ability to think clearly and communicate that thinking to others is not a soft skill. It is the foundational skill. Everything else — financial analysis, strategic judgment, leadership — multiplies in value when it can be clearly expressed and persuasively shared.
The Problem With How We Teach Communication Today
Most schools treat communication as a checkbox. A required freshman composition course. A presentation here and there. A grade on “participation.”
What they rarely do is give students the sustained, rigorous practice of actually wrestling with ideas — out loud, in dialogue, with others who push back — until clarity becomes a habit rather than an accident.
That’s the gap Reliance College exists to fill.
What Our Students Are Learning
At Reliance, communication isn’t a course. It’s the method.
Through collaborative Socratic dialogue, students practice the art of clear thinking every single day. They read challenging texts — Aristotle, Tocqueville, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith — and then they have to do something most students never do: explain what they actually think, defend it with evidence, listen carefully to disagreement, and refine their position in real time.
It’s demanding. It’s uncomfortable at first. And it’s exactly what builds the kind of communication confidence that Buffett is describing.
Great Connections alumna Savannah List describes what that practice gave her:
“Taking the time first to understand what the author is saying before we decide whether we agree or not — that’s been a very important practice for me.”
She applies it directly in her professional life:
“A lot of times in meetings, people realize we’re not talking about the same thing. I can jump in and facilitate: ‘Let’s talk about the definition of this, let’s get on the same page.’ Being able to navigate that is one of the skills I learned in the program.”
That is Buffett’s lesson, lived out in a conference room.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
We are entering an era in which artificial intelligence can draft emails, summarize documents, write code, and generate reports in seconds. The students who will lead in this world are not the ones who can produce information fastest — machines already win that race.
The students who will lead are the ones who can think clearly about what matters, communicate that thinking with conviction, and connect with other human beings in ways no algorithm can replicate.
Judgment. Clarity. Persuasion. These are not relics of a pre-digital education. They are the most future-proof skills a young person can develop.
As investment banker Blair Effron recently put it: “Judgment is not going out of style.”
Buffett understood this intuitively when he walked into that Carnegie course. He wasn’t learning a trick. He was investing in a capacity — one that would compound over an entire lifetime of decisions, relationships, and leadership.
The Same Investment, Available Now
The Great Connections Seminar won’t cost you $100. But the return — in confidence, clarity, and the lifelong habit of thinking and speaking well — is precisely what Buffett was describing.
Students who attend don’t just read great books. They practice, in real time, the art of understanding an idea deeply before judging it, defending a position with evidence, and listening carefully enough to change their minds when the argument demands it.
That is communication. Not the checkbox version — the real version. It’s the kind that compounds.
