What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

by Stephen A. Schwarzman

But I’ve always believed that 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.

you can tackle only one personally defining effort at a time, it’s important to pursue a goal that is truly worthy of the focus it will require to ensure its success.

Rarely do they see the turning points that could have taken you in a completely different direction. But it’s at these inflection points that the most important lessons in business and life are learned.

“The best executives are made, not born. They absorb information, study their own experiences, learn from their mistakes, and evolve.”

high tolerance for pain and to understand the power of preparation, essential lessons for any 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. Jack Armstrong, my track coach

Teaching, I came to believe, is about more than sharing knowledge. You have to remove the obstacles in people’s way.

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.

As long as you can be honest and rational and are able to explain yourself, there is no reason to feel uncomfortable.

No one person, however smart, can solve every problem. But an army of smart people talking candidly with one another will.

Getting to know Jack and watching him in action reinforced my growing belief that the most important asset in business is information. The more you know, the more perspectives you have and the more connections you can make, which allow you to anticipate issues.

I observed that when I was the one making the decisions and the voices rose and tempers flared, my heart would beat faster and my breathing would become more shallow. I became less effective, less in control of my own cognitive responses. The fix, I found, was to focus on my breathing, slow it down and relax my shoulders, until my breaths were long and deep. The effect was astonishing. My thoughts became clearer. I became more objective and rational about the situation at hand,

Another trick I had learned for managing stress was to take a moment to slow myself down. People were always happy to let me have that extra moment. It even seemed to reassure them. They would be even more eager to hear what I had to say once I was ready.

You will need to speak up when you see something wrong that can be corrected. Don’t fear doing that, because certain people have an obligation to society to do that.

I rarely take notes in meetings. I just pay very close attention to what the other person is saying and the way he or she is saying it. If I can, I try to find some point of connection, an area of common ground, a shared interest or experience that turns a professional encounter into a more personal one. It sounds like common sense, but apparently in practice, it’s relatively rare.

If I can help someone and become a friend to their situation, everything else follows.

There is nothing more interesting to people than their own problems. If you can find out what they are and come up with solutions, they will want to talk to you no matter their rank or status. The harder the problem and the scarcer the solution, the more valuable your advice is.

value of persistence, of running those extra miles and making those deposits of hard work, so they were there when I needed a withdrawal.

Mastery like that takes experience, endurance, and tolerance for pain. And it yields the greatest rewards.

I found that the harder the problem, the more limited the competition. If something’s easy, there will always be plenty of people willing to help solve it. But find a real mess, and there is no one around. If you can clean it up, you will find yourself in rare company.

For a pair of entrepreneurs trying to break through, solving hard problems was going to be the best way of proving ourselves.

I had come to understand that success is about taking advantage of those rare moments of opportunity that you can’t predict but come to you provided you’re alert and open to major changes.

As a salesman, I’d learned you can’t just pitch once and be done. Just because you believe in something doesn’t guarantee anyone else will. You’ve got to sell your vision over and over again. Most people don’t like change, and you have to overwhelm them with your argument, and some charm. If you believe in what you’re selling and they say no, you have to presume that they don’t fully understand, so you give them another opportunity.

when you believe in what you’re doing, overwhelmed or not, you have to keep moving forward, even when the quest feels hopeless.

like to finish work quickly. Even if tasks are not urgent, I like to get them done to avoid the unnecessary risks of delay.

Our urgency had saved us.

To be successful you have to put yourself in situations and places you have no right being in. You shake your head and learn from your own stupidity. But through sheer will, you wear the world down, and it gives you what you want.

Failures are often the best teachers in any organization. You must not bury your failures but talk about them openly and analyze what went wrong so you can learn new rules for decision making. Failures can be enormous gifts, catalysts that change the course of any organization and make it successful in the future.

overwhelmed by work, I said, pass on some of your work to others. It might not feel natural. High achievers tend to want to volunteer for more responsibility, not give up some of what they have taken on. But all that anyone higher up in the firm cares about is that the work is done well. There is nothing heroic or commendable about taking on too much and then screwing it up. Far better to focus on what you can do, do it well, and share the rest.

As for integrity, the easiest way I could explain it was in terms of reputation. To earn a great reputation, you think long term. I had been building my reputation since growing up in suburban Philadelphia, true to those middle-class values of honesty, hard work, respect for others, and always doing what you say you will. If those values sound simple, it is because they are. Anything more complicated can get lost amid the traps and temptations of our work. So my message to our new analysts was simple: stick to our values and never risk our reputation.

It’s important to always be open to new experiences, even if they don’t completely fit your agenda.

they made up for in stamina. They would never give up. They would take the pain and make it to the end of the race despite the difficulties.

You are never more vulnerable than at the moment you think you have succeeded.

firm must at some point permit systems to be implemented that allow other people to help drive the organization forward.

Changing your behavior in the face of changing information is always hard. But when people are doing well, they don’t want to change. They choose to ignore the discordant notes and the tunes you are hearing. They feel threatened by bad news and dread the uncertainty of change and the hard work it demands. This tendency makes them passive and rigid at the very moment they should be most active and flexible.

I have always regarded worry as an active, liberating kind of activity. Worrying allows you to articulate the downside in any situation and leads to action to avoid it.

Life is long, and helping people when they need it often comes back to you in ways you least expect it. You never forget the friends who came to your aid in tough situations.

Success breeds arrogance and complacency, he said. You only learn from your mistakes and when the worst happens.

Politicians across the spectrum are just people looking for answers. If you can help, you should.

World leaders are no different from anyone else. If you talk about what’s on their mind and have something to offer, they will listen, Democrats, Republicans, princes, or prime ministers.

When you take up any challenge laid down in Washington, you can never be certain of the outcome. But whether you succeed or fail, if the goal is to help your country, it is almost always worth doing.

I had learned not only to manage through crises, but also to create them for ourselves and our clients in order to provoke a change in the status quo that creates opportunity.

When people are promoted, there are a lot of feelings to consider. Those promoted might feel a sense of pride in their own success but also anxiety about their new responsibilities. Others will have thought they would get promoted and didn’t. Some will feel excited about having a new boss; others will feel unmoored and frightened of change. The effects of those feelings will show up in unusual ways and at strange times, and being aware of them, understanding and managing them, is essential to the success of any leader. This was one of those management lessons you learn only from experience.

It is so important that people understand how much you appreciate them and that you make them feel good about themselves. That self-confidence is the basis for great performance.

I call everyone who has been made partner, and those who haven’t. I tell each of them how I feel about them—about their abilities, their potential, and what I think we can build together at Blackstone. That openness creates cohesion in the business. I can’t imagine building an organization any other way.