The Most Successful People Read Old Books
Nobody uncovers useful secrets from TikTok slop
People have impressively short attention spans.
Well before TikTok, history has the tendency of being forgotten or dismissed for not fitting present day norms. Each generation is focused on the problems plaguing them, believing their trials are unique and unprecedented. They don’t care about what happened before, only what’s happening today and what they think will happen in the future, not realizing the past is where they will find most answers.
People underestimate the value of history because they don’t see how what’s happened before could possibly apply to them. Whether it’s the narcissism to believe that nobody has ever dealt with a similar situation or the naivety to think there hasn’t been a time like this in history. IE: This time it’s different. This logic is flawed.
You see this in areas as disparate as finance, technology, politics and art. There have been plenty of changes but just as many things that have remained the same.
The recent advances in AI might be unprecedented but this is hardly the first time a Leopold Aschenbrenner type has earned impressive returns in the short run by being aggressive only to blow up at the sign of unexpected volatility. As we discussed last week, Aschenbrenner is knowledgeable about AI but inexperienced when it comes to financial markets. Compared to somebody like a Ken Griffin who’s been a leading hedge fund titan for longer than Leo’s been alive, he’s at a severe disadvantage. Griffin and Citadel have lived through several crisis, understanding volatility can strike at unexpected times. This is scar tissue a fresh faced 24 year old can’t learn from prompting Claude.
This doesn’t mean you need to wait until your 60s to become a great investor or a leading figure in a particular domain. Young people can outperform older peers. What they lack from experience, they usually have more energy, open minds and suffer from less inertia. In some fields like technology, this is a major advantage.
Yet to innovate, you need to understand the current state of things, not to mention what happened before. Otherwise how can you know if what you’re working on is even new? You can be the millionth person to repeat the same mistake with the hubris to believe you’re the first.
There’s plenty of valuable lessons learnt from your own mistakes/experiences instead of just taking information on face value, but it’s also painful. You don’t need to always put your hand on the stove to confirm it’s hot. Sometimes you can take somebody else’s word for it. Given the choice, I’m sure Leopold would have preferred not to get liquidated in such a public and humiliating manner. He definitely won’t forget this episode, but hearing about somebody else’s own folly with leverage and concentration could have saved him a ton of embarrassment.
Books are a codified reflection of somebody else’s own thoughts and experiments. By reading, you can increase your own surface area of knowledge, even if it’s second hand. I probably don’t need to convince you reading is good. However, what you read is what makes the difference between expanding your mind and filling it garbage barely better than what you find on social media.
Some authors are now publishing hundreds of books per year using LLMs. Many of the readers won’t realize they are consuming AI slop. This is an evolution of a problem that has always existed in publishing. Publishers are businesses. Their motivation is to put out books people will buy. Quality helps, but it is hardly their only consideration. Thousands of new books appear every year. Some become bestsellers, fewer remain widely recommended years later and even less say something people find worth remembering decades afterward.
This is why with few exceptions, you should usually ignore new best seller lists. These lists are usually gamed by the author and publisher anyway. If people are still recommending a book ten years after it comes out, then it’s probably good. If something is still read 20 years after release it’s a classic. Older than that, it’s a foundational work.
Some books have short shelf lives. A book explaining the current capabilities of LLMs in 2022 is already irrelevant. Most political memoirs have always been ghost written slop, whom the only paying customers are the political parties who back them.
Others are timeless, that if anything, get better over time. The longer they are around, the more time there is to survive scrutiny. If a book can get analyzed, dissected for decades and centuries, but people still revert to that, you know it’s more resilient then something fresh off the press.
The Iliad or The Odyssey are better than 99.99% of anything produced afterwards. Not because writing was better 3,000 years ago but because of survivorship bias; everything else from that time and most of that’s come after wasn’t worth repeating or transcribing so it was lost to history. Lots of books go out of print because publishers and the reading public doesn’t feel like they are worth re-issuing. Since most aren’t worth reading when they come out, it stands to reason they won’t be anymore worthwhile years later either. Some are robust, staying as relevant as when they came out, such as How to Make Friends and Influence People.
Others are anti-fragile that become more valuable the longer time goes by, such as Moby-Dick. In either case, if you come across books that came out a long time ago, there’s a decent chance they contain something novel. If you want to have an edge, you need to uncover secrets. Some secrets come from your own experience, others you can uncover by re-discovering what’s been forgotten.
It’s not a coincidence that when you look at a list of Warren Buffett’s recommended books, you’ll notice most are decades old. Few were released recently. Somebody like Buffett has forgotten more about investing than any book author could ever distill but Buffett hasn’t lived through it all. A century is a long time, but he was born after the depression of 1929, and all the preceding market crashes. If he only focused on the financial markets from 1950 and onwards, he probably could have still been a great investor, but he wouldn’t be Warren Buffett. Yet reading old books alone won’t make you the best in your field, you need to earn it.
Knowledge without application has its limits. There’s a scene from Limitless after Bradley Cooper starts taking a nootropic NZT, and he puts up astonishing returns in short order. He attracts the attention of some financial heavyweights, including Robert DeNiro. Bobby D is impressed with Cooper but he points out that these powers of his were not earned. He was a smart kid but he hadn’t lived through tough times, like DeNiro had to get where he has. Cooper has had it come too easily to him, therefore he doesn’t understand what he doesn’t know.
(can skip to 30 seconds)
DeNiro is so convincing Bradley Cooper wasn’t sure if the message was for him or his character.
This is why greats like Warren Buffett and Ken Griffin can master the markets for decades. They are students of history and they have the scares. Leopold is a smart kid but he had not been investing long enough to accumulate the scar tissue. He didn’t earn the success that came to him as quickly as it did, which is why he was unprepared for it. He wasn’t in the game long enough to learn from his own experience, but if he had read What I Learnt Losing a Million Dollars, perhaps he wouldn’t be preparing to write its sequel What I learnt Losing Billions of Dollars.
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I'd add that when it comes to fiction or literary non-fiction, good novels or otherwise require creative interpretation. What makes something last is that very different kinds of people across very different time periods can take something from their own different experiences and find resonances within the same work.
Some of your examples like the Odyssey and Moby Dick are illustrative here. The written Odyssey is itself an adaptation of pre-existing oral storytelling. It's structured like a series of loosely connected episodes joined together with similar characters, because it's something of a Sports Centre Highlight Reel of all the Greek spoken story bangers of Antiquity. The written version is itself a creative interpretation of those stories. It has since undergone a series of adaptations into different languages and on-screen adaptations. Many people are mad at Emily Wilson, one of that text's more recent translators, for her criticism of Christopher Nolan's film, but really what she's saying is that what Nolan has taken from the text is a very limited creative interpretation of what's there. People can agree or disagree. Somewhat amusingly, when Wilson's 2017 translation was released, she was similarly criticized by other Classicists for a variety of reasons, including that her choice to try and match the ancient Greek poetic structure resulted in her version being written in a much more spare and clipped language than some other adaptations. However and whoever is adapting it, however, The Odyssey, is an amazing machine for generating interpretations and arguments, and most importantly passion for what it could mean. This is what makes it something that is still being fought over and read after thousands of years.
Meanwhile, Moby Dick is now known as the Great American Novel, which would have done absolutely no good to Mr. Herman Melville himself, who ruined his life with the publication of the book. Before Moby Dick, Melville was known as a writer of complicated but popular adventure tails on the high seas (more or less). He wrote Moby Dick because he really, really, really, really fucking loved whales and was like "let's get everything that is known about whales on to the page." Moby Dick was released to mostly negative comment in America beginning the "dying in obscurity" phase of his career.* I suspect many readers of it today are still a little surprised by its unusual structure of 100 Pages of Plot, 400 pages of Semi-related Facts and Stories About Whales, and 100 More Pages of Plot Picking Up From the First 100 Pages. After it bombed, Melville became a customs inspector and died in relative obscurity. Moby Dick's legacy is largely a post-Melville's life phenomenon, as literary critics in England identified and appreciated it as a masterpiece at a time when there was anxiety over whether Americans could produce something that would be considered a Great Novel. Turns out, it had already been written. What was missing at the time was critics who appreciated the text's difficulty as a feature, rather than a bug, for generating interpretations about the many themes within the book that is about a lot more than just whales.
All this to say, read new books, read old ones, but a good test of whether something is worth reading is if it leaves you thinking about what it was about or wondering if it can be read more than one way. If you can read it at different points in your life and come away with completely different impressions, then it might be on to something. In addition to expanding your knowledge, this kind of creative interpretation is a different kind of analysis that's worth working on. Beach reads have their place and it is summer, but people don't threaten to launch a thousand rhetorical ships because a bestseller was adapted badly for the screen.
Happy Tuesday!
*This phase did produce The Confidence Man, which is a challenging read but uh, haha, let me tell you how relevant it still is; it's very relevant to today.