Billionaire investing phenom Warren Buffett shares a synopsis of his career path history in a recent article for Forbes, recalling his early passion for reading about investing and the heavy influence his father had on his career choice.

“If he’d been a shoe salesman, I might be a shoe salesman now,” quips Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway CEO reminisces how he had read every book on investing in the Omaha Public Library by the time he was 11, “some of them more than once,” and how Benjamin Graham’s tome The Intelligent Investor “became the largest influence on my investing life by accident, while I was at the University of Nebraska.”

Buffett goes on to describe his history with Geico and the path that led him to what he calls his “favorite investment.” The decision, he writes, was aligned with his philosophy of finding a strong business that he can understand “with a durable competitive advantage, run by able  and honest people, and available  at a price that makes sense.”