Journalist Michael Lewis delighted students and their families with his anecdotes and insights when he visited Colgate University as part of the Kerschner Family Series Global Leaders during Family Weekend on Saturday Nov. 1. Lewis is the author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball,” “The Big Short” and 15 other titles, which focus on a wide range of subjects from finance to politics and human behavior.
Professor of History Dan Bouk and Lewis engaged in coversation with one another on stage, with Bouk posing questions to Lewis. Before answering these questions, Lewis began by describing how disinterested he was in pleasing teachers in school. He was never told by English teachers that he had any special writing ability, nor did he achieve particularly strong grades. Despite this, he ended up at Princeton, which he attributes to his baseball abilities and his father’s legacy.
Lewis described how improbable his career seemed by telling an anecdote about a reunion with an old friend whom he had not seen since high school.
“The first thing he says to me, before ‘Hello,’ is ‘So who writes your books?’” Lewis said. “There’s no one who knew me when I graduated from college who would say ‘Oh, he’s going to have some career as a writer.’ … You might not know what you have inside of you. You still might not know who you are. So don’t overdetermine. Don’t insist that you aren’t something.”
Bouk enjoyed Lewis’ message for students to push back against professors and discover what truly interests them. He then described his own writing process as an academic as defensive.
“I hate the idea that someone will find something wrong — I am committed to the truth,” Bouk said. “There must be a moment when you are scared, when you are afraid, that changes your behavior and makes you look at the paragraph one more time. What are the scary moments?”
Lewis described two scary moments. The first one occurs when self-doubt creeps into the space between finishing his last book and starting a new one.
“At the end of every book I think, ‘Okay, maybe I’m not a writer anymore.’ Maybe nothing good enough will walk in the door, which will justify taking a year of my life to write a book about,” Lewis said. “When it comes time to write a book again, I feel like a fraud. That is the scariest part before I start all over again. It’s like ‘Do I still have it?’”
A second scary moment happens when the book finally comes out, and Lewis must face positive, along with negative, book reviews — because there will always be some of each.
One of Lewis’ most well-known books is “Liar’s Poker,” which he wrote about his time as an investment banker in the 1980s at the Salomon Brothers firm on Wall Street. Bouk offered a further description of the book as a commentary on how the idea of failure permeates professional ambitions.
“It’s a book from the heart of Wall Street, the premise of which is that any firm that would hire me, with the qualities I have, is probably bound for failure,” Bouk said.
Using “Liar’s Poker” as an example of writing that is critical of its subjects and setting, Bouk asked whether or not Lewis thinks about the effects his books will have. In Lewis’ reply, he clarified that this consideration of reactions hinders his writing process.
“If I ever thought, ‘I’m going to write things that make the world do this,’ I gave up that thought,” Lewis said. “If you try to muscle a reader and tell them what they are supposed to get out of a book, you just lose them. The best books create a hole for the reader to walk into and make it their book. They make it whatever they need. So, I try to stop myself from thinking too hard about what the consequences of this book are. I think it just gets in the way of the book.”
Sophomore Liv Sandberg, a mathematical economics student, attended the talk due to her interest in working on Wall Street. Sandberg reflected on how Lewis’ storytelling conveyed that unsung efforts by government workers can fuel the economy.
“I found his use of storytelling really compelling. His humor kept me engaged, but his stories still made me think,” Sandberg said. “It reminded me how much of the most important work happens quietly, without recognition. It left me thinking about how much of the economy depends on those unnoticed contributions, and that feels especially relevant now with the shutdown.”
