Success Quote by Warren Buffett

Buffett’s line lands because it sounds like a genial Midwestern shrug while smuggling in a threat assessment. “Ignorance” isn’t just not knowing; it’s the confident not-knowing that shows up in markets when people mistake recent luck for skill. “Leverage” is the accelerator: borrowed money, margin, derivatives, any tool that multiplies outcomes. Put them together and “interesting” becomes a dry euphemism for catastrophic. He’s using understatement the way experienced operators do when they’re describing something they’ve watched hurt people.

The specific intent is cautionary, but not moralistic. Buffett isn’t arguing that leverage is inherently evil or that ignorance is shameful; he’s pointing to a structural danger: errors don’t stay small when you’ve increased the stakes with debt. Leverage doesn’t create bad decisions, it makes them consequential, fast, and contagious. That’s why the phrase carries systemic subtext: one person’s miscalculation becomes everyone’s problem when lenders, counterparties, and confidence are wired together.

Contextually, it’s Buffett speaking from a long memory of boom-bust cycles where sophistication often masks fragility. In modern finance, the most perilous ignorance is thinking you understand a product because you can price it, model it, or trade it. Buffett’s charm here is rhetorical jiu-jitsu: he avoids technical scare language and instead offers a folksy equation that any listener can apply to their own risk-taking. The wit is that “interesting results” is what you call a wreck when you don’t need to raise your voice to be heard.