The Ledger, every show

“When I look at my own career, I would not be where I am today if in my twenties and thirties I was working remotely.”

“When people stop, stop hiring and start firing, we're going to find out who gets fired first. And if you don't have any, if you're not built up any kind of face time or any kind of social capital in your organization, you're, you, it's much easier for you to b…”

“The problem with the question tell me the hardest thing you've done is that the person we're most interested in wouldn't be able to answer that question because they wouldn't have perceived it as hard.”

“Oh, we're just not building enough of it. You know, for a million stupid reasons, and we've let existing homeowners close the door to potential homeowners. We treat landlords like enemies. We think the rules of the marketplace don't apply when it comes to hous…”

“In an academic context, there are real costs to being in the bottom third of your class. There's a huge amount of research that just says, when you're in the bottom third, or the bottom quarter, whatever, it's psychologically Quite debilitating. And if you're …”

“There is some intriguing evidence that if you're an employer and you're hiring, You're better off choosing people who are at the top of their class regardless of where that class was situated, right? In other words, paying more attention to class rank than you…”

“What you want is someone who's one step ahead of you. So you can actually kind of grow with your mentor, right? And they're much, they have just been through what you are about to go through. So their advice is actually current and useful.”

“So, if I took the top A hundred colleges in the United States, like probably take a top one 50, but take a top hundred. For an undergraduate degree, there are the quality of, or the resources, faculty resources available to students are roughly equivalent.”

“Now the reason to go into work is different. Now the reason to go into work is to allow others to have the same opportunity that I had, right? But if I had to work remotely for the rest of my career, would I be fine? I'd be totally fine. It just doesn't make a…”

“The mistake I made was, there's a class of person for whom, if I'm a mom, single mom with two kids in school, babysitting issues, whatever, and I'm doing a job where I'm actually really good at it, and I don't need that kind of social interaction, then just th…”

“If you're interested in getting better, you cannot have a thin skin. So, If you want to have a, if you want to continue on with your thin skin, then you have to give up on the notion of being, of getting better. It's fine. If you want to be, you have to essent…”

“I, there's all, and I think that for most leaders, when we confront failure, we, our first assumption is it's a failure of incompetence, and it rarely is. Most failures at a high level are failures of overconfidence.”

“And that I do think that we're way too slow to recognize when we're in a no-win situation. And where the only option available to us is to take a real risk.”

“Well, you have to lower the cost of failure. So you can't fire the coach if they pull the goalie early and it blows up in their face. Right? You gotta, you have to, you actually have to sit down with the mattress and say that was the right decision. Right? You…”

“Anyone who's in a creative field understands that you have a moment. If you're successful, you have a moment in the zeitgeist, and then the moment passes for everybody. You can't, I'm not always gonna sell as many books as I did with outliers. That was a momen…”

“When someone says I'm out of inspiration, what they mean is my world's become too small. That's what they're saying. So you had to broaden your world, right?”

“You don't want to consume only finished products. That's the, that's where you get stuck. Because then you're consuming what everyone else is consuming. You want to consume unfinished products.”

“For all of the crap it takes, it is really good at certain, very, very specific things. It's an idea-finding mechanism. It's really good.”

“Particularly once you abstract out from the United States, I mean, if we were having this conversation in Africa, we would not be bringing this up. We would be like, there's never been a better time, or South America, or any place that was historically economi…”