Danny ChaiI’ve said countless times how I’m a huge fan of John Bogle. I strongly recommend reading all of his books and speeches, but in particular, he gave a recent speech at Georgetown University’s MBA commencement that is really fantastic. It’s entitled “Enough”, and he begins with this anecdote:
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have… Enough.”
Enough. So eloquent in its simplicity.
He also says much the same in a follow-up interview with the Dallas Morning News. He’s critical of the financial industry because it has gotten so big and it doesn’t create anything. As he says it:
This country is moving to a world where we’re no longer making anything. We’re merely trading pieces of paper, swapping stocks and bonds back and forth with one another, and paying our financial croupiers a veritable fortune.
I have no problem with people making a lot of money if they’re making contributions to society. But the financial industry withdraws money that businesses earn before it is passed down to investors at the bottom of the food chain.
I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Ultimately, the health of the economy depends on how much we produce, not how much we shuffle back and forth. Although I may be biased by my personality. When I was a child, my dad would repeatedly say to me that he didn’t care what I did for a living under two conditions: 1) that whatever I did, even if it was being a garbage man (I don’t know why garbage man was always the example, but it was), that I tried to be the best at my field that I could be, and 2) that I not be a lawyer.
I’m not 100% sure why he hated lawyers so much, and I think he was far too strong about it and incorrect in his conclusions, but I think I get the heart behind it. To him, lawyers didn’t create anything, they only took away; they were parasitic. He was an engineer, so that particularly grated him, because all good engineers enjoy and value building things.
I don’t share at all his distaste for the legal profession, but I do share his value on creativity. Both technically and musically, it’s vitally important to me that I be creating, building something. That’s the most fun part of life, I think.
Whoa, big digression.