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it’s just as hard to achieve big goals as it is small ones.
Since 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.
Every entrepreneur knows the feeling: that moment of despair when the only thing you are aware of is the giant gap between where you find yourself and the life and business you imagine. Once you succeed, people see only the success. If you fail, they see only the failure. 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.”
We believe in meritocracy and excellence, openness and integrity. And we work hard to hire only people who share those beliefs. We are fixated on managing risk and never losing money. We are strong believers in innovation and growth—constantly asking questions in order to anticipate events so that we can evolve and change before we are forced to.
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 believe that education is a discipline. The object of this discipline is to learn how to think. Once we have mastered this we can use it to learn a vocation, appreciate art, or read a book. Education simply enables us to appreciate the ever-changing drama fashioned of God’s own hand, life itself. Education continues when we leave the classroom. Our associations with friends, our participation in clubs all increase our store of knowledge. In fact, we never stop learning until we die. My fellow officers and I just hope that you will become aware of the purpose of education and follow its basic
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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.
“I need $10,500 because I heard there’s another person graduating from Yale who’s making $10,000, and I want to be the highest-paid person in my class.”
Here was a world in which huge amounts of money were at stake, yet no one even bothered to train new people. They assumed we were smart enough to figure it out. That seemed like a crazy approach to me.
I felt bad about my time at DLJ. I had been more or less useless. No one had bothered to train me, and I had drifted around.
“There’s no sense to it,” he told us. “None. Zero. You spend your time trying to take a hill. You take it. And five days later, you abandon it and the bad guys go right back up the hill. It’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever been involved with in my life. We don’t know who the good guys are or the bad guys are. Nobody can speak their language. They’re friends by day, and try to kill us at night. Our officers are mostly idiots.” He even told us that if we had to kill one of our officers to save ourselves from a pointless death, we should consider it.
The Reserves reinforced my suspicion of hierarchy and my confidence in going against it if I saw something wrong.
Harvard Business School was teaching only one idea, disguised as different courses. The lesson was that everything in business relates to everything else. For a business to succeed, each part has to work on its own and with all the other parts. It’s a closed, integrated system, organized by managers.
By the time I got to the December holiday, I was ready to drop out. I was bored. Boston was cold. The teaching was mediocre, done mostly by young assistant professors still finding their way in the classroom. Why was I wasting my life here? I was ready to go back to work.
If ever I ran an organization, I promised myself I would make it as easy as possible for people to see me and I’d always tell the truth, no matter how difficult the situation. 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.
Being a strong and accurate assessor of talent is perhaps one of the most critical skills required of any entrepreneur.
When I interview people for Blackstone, I’m looking to understand whether an individual will fit our culture.
my goal is to get into candidates’ heads to assess how they think, who they are, and whether they are right for Blackstone.
look for consistency in terms of a narrative and make special note of any anomalies or stand-out pieces of information.
My goal is to start the conversation with something that both the candidate and I will find interesting,
The more I can get candidates out of interview mode and into a natural conversation, the easier it becomes for me to evaluate how they think, react, and might adapt to change.
Alternatively, I’ll ask about something fascinating or newsworthy. If they are familiar with the topic, I’ll look for how they approach the discussion. Do they have a point of view? Is their assessment logical and analytical? If they don’t know what I’m talking about, do they admit it and find a way to move on, or do they try to fake it?
evaluating their ability to deal with uncertainty.
If a candidate doesn’t demonstrate the ability to connect, engage, pivot, and change course within the bounds of a conversation, chances are that person won’t fare well at Blackstone.
1. Be on time. Punctuality
2. Be authentic.
3. Be prepared.
4. Be candid.
5. Be confident.
6. Be curious.
7. Avoid discussing divisive political issues unless you are asked.
8. Mention people you know at an organization only if you like and respect them.
Investors are always looking for great investments. The easier you make it for them, the better for everyone.
I had been so freaked out by my mistake that instead of tearing out the bad pages, I had torn out the good ones. I could have melted under the table.
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.
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, about what I needed to do to win.
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. So I took a moment and then began.
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.
Lehman was in deep trouble. Lew and some of his allies in the London office had made a huge trade in commercial paper—loans to companies with no collateral.
Lehman was back on the edge of collapse.
“I don’t understand why all of you at Lehman Brothers hate each other. I get along with both of you.”
Coach Armstrong had taught me the value of persistence, of running those extra miles and making those deposits of hard work, so they were there when I needed a withdrawal. And I had figured how to invest them to advance my career.
taught me the importance of rigor, eliminating risk, and asking for help.
money is a poor cure for a bad situation.
it’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one.
It’s hard to raise the money and to find the right people. So if you’re going to dedicate your life to a business, which is the only way it will ever work, you should choose one with the potential to be huge.
building our business was to keep challenging ourselves with an open-ended question: Why not?
