it’s just as hard to achieve big goals as it is small ones. The only difference is that bigger goals have much more significant consequences.
“The best executives are made, not born. They absorb information, study their own experiences, learn from their mistakes, and evolve.”
You can learn to be a manager. You can even learn to be a leader. But you can’t learn to be an entrepreneur.
If you want something badly enough, you can find a way. You can create it out of nothing. And before you know it, there it is. But wanting something isn’t enough. If you’re going to pursue difficult goals, you’re inevitably going to fall short sometimes. It’s one of the costs of ambition.
“I did it for you, Steve. I couldn’t let you down.” Training and competing together, we made each other better.
Teaching, I came to believe, is about more than sharing knowledge. You have to remove the obstacles in people’s way.
While my classmates were spending the summer hitting tennis balls and working in offices, I had been sweating in an engine room and dodging blows in Colombian bars. But now, I was ready to approach Yale on my own terms.
if you’re going to commit yourself to something, it’s as easy to do something big as it is to do something small. Both will consume your time and energy, so make sure your fantasy is worthy of your pursuit, with rewards commensurate to your effort.
developing a reputation as someone who made the improbable happen.
“I want to be a telephone switchboard,” I told my interviewer, “taking in information from countless feeds, sorting it, and sending it back out into the world.”
At some point in life, we have to figure out who we are, he said. The sooner we do it the better, so we can pursue the opportunities that are right for us, not some false dream created by others.
I had met Larry when I had seen him with his young family at a Yale fifteenth reunion and felt compelled to buy a copy of Babar the Elephant for his son. I had no idea who Larry was, but my random act of generosity led to a friendship and now this interview.
People often think theirs is the only reality, but there are as many realities as there are individuals. The more you see of them, the more likely you are to make sense of them.
everything in business relates to everything else.
No one person, however smart, can solve every problem. But an army of smart people talking candidly with one another will.
early encounters and friendships have a way of reappearing throughout your life.
There are people who come to finance from other professions, from law or the media perhaps, but the best I’ve ever worked with grew up in it. They learned by doing the fundamental analysis. They established strong foundations for their careers by discovering that the smallest things matter and suffering the indignity of their early mistakes.
the most important asset in business is information.