Rubenstein Tells Young Workers: Learn to Read and Write

Billionaire David Rubenstein says the fundamentals of career success have not changed—and he is telling young workers to master reading, speaking, and writing even as AI absorbs routine cognitive tasks.

"For a young person, the best thing to do is: Learn how to read and enjoy reading, learn how to speak effectively and persuasively, and learn how to write reasonably well," Rubenstein told Business Insider in a recent interview.

The 77-year-old cofounder of the $14 billion global investment firm Carlyle Group also advised budding workers against simply chasing paychecks or prestige. Instead, he said, "find something that you really enjoy and make it your life's work." He believes success will follow when young professionals genuinely enjoy a job that doesn't feel like work. As he put it: "Nobody ever won a Nobel Prize hating what they do."

Rubenstein acknowledged the world is changing and that more professionals now lean on AI for reading and writing. But he argued human judgment will always matter in distinguishing good writing from bad. "I just think the basic skills that have gotten people to be successful over the last several thousand years are probably not going to go away," he said.

He is in prominent company. Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett has said he spends 80% of his working days reading, while JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon stays current by flipping through five newspapers before his workday begins.

A soft-skills renaissance

The advice comes as AI reshapes how people consume information. Around 40% of Americans didn't read a single book last year, and CEOs say they worry they are picking up fewer books and reports because of the technology. Meeting notes, data sifting, and even leisure reading have all become optimized by AI. Now, business leaders predict a soft-skills renaissance as the technology takes on more rote work.

Daniela Amodei, president and cofounder of Anthropic, believes people skills matter more than ever as humans work alongside AI. In her view, talent with a liberal arts education—reading- and writing-heavy disciplines spanning humanities, natural sciences, sociology, and the arts—will bring the most well-rounded skill set to the job. Because AI models are already very good at STEM, she argues soft skills like emotional intelligence, communication, and curiosity now command a premium.

"I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever," Amodei said in an interview with ABC News earlier this year. "The ability to have critical thinking skills and learn how to interact with other people will be more important in the future, rather than less."

The literature major who built a frontier AI company

Some of the industry's biggest success stories illustrate the point. Jack Clark, cofounder of the $965 billion Anthropic, said majoring in English literature and creative writing set him up to become a major figure in AI. Having "intuitions," knowing the right questions to ask, and drawing on interdisciplinary insights helped him push through to new innovation.

"I'm a literature graduate, and I don't think you'd put that as a cofounder of a frontier AI company, but what turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future," Clark said during a conference earlier this year. "That's turned out to be, like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn't have predicted."

Jaime Teevan, chief scientist at Microsoft, agrees that talent with liberal arts expertise will have a leg-up in the AI era. Because using the technology now depends on natural language, context, intent, and critical thinking, humanities majors who have mastered those skills become more valuable. As AI takes on mundane, repetitive tasks, she argues that judgment, communication, and nuance are what Gen Z needs to land a job in a competitive market.

"Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking," Teevan told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

"For that, a traditional liberal-arts education is really important."

As AI handles more of the work that machines do best, the leaders building and deploying the technology are betting their own hiring decisions on the skills no chatbot can fully replicate.