A Curious Obsession with Reading, and Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is famous for being an avid reader. Many people quote his remark, "I just sit in my office and read all day," to insist—almost in a coercive way—that you must read an enormous number of books to grow intellectually and become a good investor. (And oddly enough, the people saying this are often those who have written personal finance books.) In many cases, it is hard to tell whether this is a genuine argument or a form of gaslighting.

Just as AI needs high-quality datasets to learn, humans need media that contain information—such as books—to learn. This is not an argument against reading. Rather, it is a question about the claim that you must read like crazy to make smart decisions and become wealthy, and in particular, about people who have no real connection to Warren Buffett yet make a living off his name from across the Pacific in Korea.

It is true that Warren Buffett is, by all accounts, a voracious reader. But unless you are the chairman of something like "Berkshire Hathaway 2," it is more important to understand how he built his empire than how he currently runs it.

In 2005, a PhD student painstakingly mapped out Warren Buffett’s personal network in a dissertation with the rather intimidating title, “How Can Strategic Personal Networks (SPNs) Succeed? An Inquiry into the Causes and Nature of Social Networks That Pursue a Common Goal.”

Open the appendix of that dissertation and you will find an endless list of the people Buffett interacted with—friends, neighbors, investors, board members, CEOs, golf and bridge partners, politicians, and more. It almost makes it look as if all he ever did was chat with friends, play bridge, and drop by the White House. Of course, that is not the whole story. But even a few examples are enough to show that Buffett the bookworm was not someone who lived only inside the pages of books. He poured tremendous energy into spending time with people and throwing himself into the real world.

This piece is based on an article by Frederik Gieschen of "Enter the Labyrinth." If you would like to explore the many specific networking examples he describes in detail, you can access them via the link below.