As his friend Bill Gates explains, Warren Buffett is a creature of habit. "He knows what he likes to do - and what he does, he does unbelievably well," Gates wrote in Fortune in 1996. Indeed, Warren Buffett's determination and creativity have made him who he is now: the chairman of a long-term investment company with more than $2 billion in holdings.

As a child in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffett was already ambitious. He was an enthusiastic and industrious paper boy for the Washington Post, and tried to cover more than one route at the same time. He also made money by collecting and selling lost golf balls and started playing the stock market with one of his sisters when he was eleven. At twelve, he was betting on horses, and by high school he had started a business (pinball machines) with a friend, which earned him fifty dollars a week. Not only did he own a business by graduation, but he also had bought himself forty acres of Nebraskan farm land with his profit.

Graduate school at Columbia was a formative time for Buffett. It was there that he met Benjamin Graham, an economic scholar whose work Buffett had begun studying in college. Buffett believed strongly in Graham's theory that it is wise to look for stocks of companies that are undervalued, which will most probably prosper with a little time. Thus began Buffett's untraditional approach to portfolio management.

After working for his father's investment banking company for the three years after business school, Buffett returned to Graham and worked as a security analyst at Graham's company for two years until 1956. In that year, at the age of 25, Buffett started his own investment company, the Buffett Partnership, using $5,000 of his own funds and collecting $100,000 from interested friends and family. One of the smartest moves made by Buffet's company at that time was to invest in American Express. In 1963, a scandal surrounded AmEx, and Wall Street believed the company was near the end - but Buffett noticed that people were still using the card in restaurants and shops. He went ahead and bought 5 percent of the stock, which by 1971 had risen from 35 to 189 market points. Buffett is now chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which makes the long-term investments which Buffett is so adept at choosing. Today, Berkshire Hathaway owns companies like World Book and See's Candies, as well as major stakes in American Express, Disney, Coca-Cola, Gannett, Gillette, and the Washington Post Co., and Buffett still lives in the house in Omaha that he bought when he was just 27 years old.