Berkshire’s Buffett allows his kids’ lives to “fall apart.” The eldest dropped out of school to farm; the daughter dropped out to get married and become a housewife, then later divorced; the younger son dropped out to play music. Not only did the three kids fail to attend famous schools—they didn’t even finish their undergraduate degrees. To parents in East Asia, this is basically a “catastrophe.” If you’re going to buy a degree with money, you have to get it too. But Buffett believes life is a complex probability problem: divorce, bankruptcy, and career confusion are all required fields. Parents have no right—and no need—to help their children skip these hardships, because skipping them is equivalent to depriving the child of opportunities to build self-awareness.

He’s Buffett, after all. He’s got to pave the way for his kids—pave it with gold—and still pave from Omaha to Washington, right? At worst, paving to get someone elected as a politician can’t be that hard either.

In the end, although Buffett’s children went through setbacks, they all found their own positions. Howard became a farm owner and philanthropist; Suzy became a housewife and a foundation executive; Peter became a musician who won an Emmy Award. Their lives grew upward from the ground, solidly.

Buffett knows better than anyone that the only way to make a road is to walk it yourself. In the “paving the road” that parents in East Asia often do, they shove the single wooden bridge they themselves crossed into their kids, forgetting that the child might not even want to go to the other side—or that the bridge itself might be about to collapse. The first gives the child the courage to live well even after leaving the parent; the second traps the child in lifelong fear that life can’t be good unless they don’t leave.

Buffett’s father once told him, “You’re unique in this world, but I won’t tell you what kind of person you will become. You should find it yourself.” So later, his way with his children was:

“Provide your child with enough conditions to do anything, not enough conditions to let him be idle.”