I was shocked to hear that billionaire tech mogul Sam Bankman-Fried disdained reading books. Given that I credit most of my life’s success and growth to reading, I wanted to look more into it. I also recently came across a fascinating text written in 1909 that predicts word-by-word SBF’s, Alameda’s and FTX’s mistakes in 2022.
The exchange with journalist Adam Fisher went something like this:
“I’m addicted to reading, which explains how I ended up being a writer.”
“Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.”
I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own.
“I’m very sceptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Of course, succinct writing is essential, and no one wants to read a dense, hard-to-read, boring book. However, most life-changing books I’ve read are already concise! I found that for reading to make an impression that may change your worldview for the better, it usually takes more than six paragraphs.
It takes a book and not a blog post because often you do not know which chapter, page or paragraph will change your mind and help you grow. You must keep reading to find the golden nuggets because things will click at some point. No human being is yet capable of knowing when that moment will come.
I recently finished reading a multiple-page, hard-to-read, dense ethics lecture on the Ethics of Speculation. The work was originally from 1909, but had SBF bothered to read it; he would have found a couple of paragraphs deep inside the lecture that could have changed his life for the better:
Every broker should recognize the grave danger of engaging in speculation himself. I will not say that it is necessarily wrong for a broker to speculate on his own account, but I remind you again of what I have just said regarding the danger to any one in a position of financial trust. A broker is in such position. He is responsible for large sums of money put in his hands by his customers to carry out their business. Without doing anything strictly illegal for the time being, the broker may become so involved in his own speculations as to seriously endanger the clients who have trusted him. Some- times this comes to a crisis which offers a very severe temptation. Suppose a brokerage concern finds itself in a position where it fears for its own solvency, and at this juncture large sums come in from customers, which the firm thinks may be adequate to pull them through and establish them on a solid basis once more. It seems so desirable to take the money of the customers under these cir- cumstances, and it is so easy to convince themselves that the customer is not being endangered thereby. The law is not as yet sufficiently stringent in the matter of prohibiting the receipt of further deposits by a concern which cannot at the moment make good its own obligations. But even an elementary sense of morality should make a broker prefer the disgrace of insolvency to the abuse of a customer’s confidence.
From: Every-day Ethics Addresses Delivered In The Page Lecture Series, 1909, Before The Senior Class Of The Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University
We know that SBF & FTX reportedly used $10 billion of customer funds to prop up their trading firm. How ironic that someone a century ago foresaw how ethically wrong this would be and that it would lead to collapse and disgrace. SBF could have avoided potentially going to jail and disgracing his family name.
SBF, and anyone who avoids reading books, would do well to learn from the wisdom of the ones that have lived and faced these problems before us. They would do well to reconsider their position on books.
It is said that only a fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man from the mistakes of others. ~ Author Unknown
Let’s keep learning from the mistakes of others; let’s read more books.
