If you're like most people, you probably have a long list of things you'd do differently if you had a second shot at life. But Warren Buffett? Not so much. In 1998, at a lecture he gave at the University of Florida's School of Business, an MBA student asked Buffett: "What would you do to live a happier life — if you could live all over again?" "This will sound disgusting," the Berkshire Hathaway CEO joked, "but the only thing would be to select a gene pool where people lived to 120 or something where I came from." While Buffett's answer might sound simple at first, the rest of his response revealed that his personal philosophy about happiness has very little to do with longevity. In fact, if he was given the option to go back and live life "all over again," he probably wouldn't take it.

Buffett is best suited for the society he's in now

The Oracle of Omaha took great care in laying out a scenario to illustrate how "extraordinarily lucky" he already feels today. He told the audience to imagine a barrel with roughly 5.8 billions of balls — one for everybody in the world. Each ball will determine important factors (e.g., your birthplace, IQ level, gender, ethnicity, skills, parents) in your "new life." "If you could put your ball back into the barrel, and they took out 100 balls at random — and you had to from pick one of those, would you put your ball back in?" he asked. In addition to not knowing which ball you'll get, there's another catch: "Of those 100 balls, five of them will be American. So if you want to be in this country, you'll only have five balls to choose from," Buffett explained. "Half of them will be women and half men. Half of them will be below average in intelligence and half above average in intelligence." He asked the students again: Do you still want to risk taking a second shot at life? "Most of you won't want to put your ball back," he said. "So what you're really saying is, 'I'm the luckiest 1% of the world right now, sitting in this room — the top 1% of the world." And that's exactly how Buffett feels. "I'm lucky to be born where I was because it was 50 to one in the United States when I was born. I've been lucky to be wired in a way that, in a market economy, pays off like crazy for me," he said.

You don't need 'luck' to be happy