If you're really serious about this, I'd recommend starting with play money (or none at all - use a fantasy portfolio), and then actively trading like you're doing your best to make money. Do this for a while - at least 6 months to a year, and ideally through a down market - and benchmark your portfolio results to the overall market performance (say, an S&P 500 index fund). A lot of people look at the absolute dollar value of their returns, say "I made $10K trading stocks, woohoo!", and don't realize that if they'd just put that money in an index fund they would've made $25K for a lot less work. Also remember that there's a large random component to stock prices - just because some of your stocks made money doesn't mean you can double down on what you did with them, because those stocks might just happen to be the ones that went up randomly. You need to track your personal returns with them against how the stock did by itself, i.e. what you would've made if you had just bought and held it, and see whether your entry and exit points really made sense.
Play money is a good idea. Any sites you recommend for this?
He invested one-on-one, in businesses he thoroughly understood, after a lot of research and understanding of the business. Think less scanning a spreadsheet or stock data and more CNBC's "The Profit" -- walking around a factory floor, looking through accounts receivable, talking to the assembly team, talking to customers. THEN making a decision to invest a lot of money and steer the direction of the business.
And no, companies don't give tours to randos. You have to do it with a lot of money on the table. Buffet isn't rags to riches; he's medium-rich to super-rich, and he got his start in much smaller businesses.
If you really want to do it Buffett's way, go check Benjamin Graham's books (The Intelligent Investor and Securities Analysis) out of the library, read through the last 40 years of Berkshire Hathaway annual reports, and then start reading !0-Ks from the SEC's EDGAR database.
This one https://www.quantopian.com/ is also interesting. It's more algorithmic trading, but has backtesting functionality and other nice features.
People who make a living by investing either start off with large amounts of capital, a healthy margin on other people's capital because of their assumed knowledge and work ethic, or by lucking out on their friend's business venture they pumped pocket money into growing big fast. I don't think many people got successful investing out of desperation.
On the plus side, if you're earning 180k a year, you can acquire the ability to not need to continue to work in your current job - assuming this is your current motivation - far more easily by cutting your living costs and investing simply and passively.
The difference between 8% and 12% return on your savings entails a lot of investment skill and luck; the difference between spending $20k per month and $10k per month not so much.