School was fine. Here’s what you need to learn about the real world.
Intelligence is learning from your own mistakes.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is learning from other people’s mistakes.
What I would like to do is share intelligence I have learned the hard way—by making countless mistakes—so you (hopefully) gain wisdom, and avoid all the things I did wrong.
1. Steal from the Best.
I learned this lesson during my time at Goldman Sachs.
I had been recruited right out of college by the firm’s mergers and acquisitions (M&A) department, the number one M&A shop on Wall Street back then. Goldman hired just one associate that fall: me. I was beyond thrilled.
But when I walked through the door on my first day, I noticed I was the only professional sporting a beard and wearing Earth Shoes. (If you are too young to know what those were, please Google it. You’ll be amused.)
So from day one I realized I was different from my colleagues. That was problem 1. Problem 2? I didn’t like my job. There were two other things that got to me.
The first was my immediate supervisor was a jerk. The second was that the work felt too “ivory tower” for me. Until I got to Goldman, I hadn’t realized that my real passion was doing whatever it took to grow a business.
About three months into the job, I went to see my boss, Steve Friedman, to get advice. This took some courage. Friedman, who would go on to become head of the National Economic Council and then the chair of President George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was not known for small talk. The man was brusque.
I explained my concerns and said I was seeking guidance for how to fit in a little better.
To my shock, he snapped, “Well, Sonnenfeldt, do you want to leave?”
The next 30 seconds passed like a lifetime as I reviewed in my mind the downside of leaving. I imagined a front-page New York Times headline, stupid sonnenfeldt walks away from career opportunity of a lifetime!
But then, from somewhere deep within me, came the words, “Well, yes . . . I think I do.”
Without missing a beat, Friedman replied, “Well, we knew you were bright but different when we hired you. Is there any place else in the firm you’d like to work?”
As coincidence would have it, literally that very morning, as I had headed to my office, the elevator had stopped on the floor below mine where a sign caught my eye. It read goldman sachs realty corp. “How about the real estate department?” I answered.
The following Monday I was working there.
Over the past four decades, I have often flashed back to Friedman’s reaction that day. Every time, I am struck by the way he analyzed the problem and quickly came up with a solution that would benefit both me—and the firm. It was a classic example of the intelligence and flexibility that a world-class company breeds into their teams.
That’s why whenever I’m up against an organizational problem I always ask myself: “How would the best people at Goldman Sachs approach this issue?”
Smart and resilient people can learn from any experience, but many of the entrepreneurs I know attribute much of their success to experience in an established, successful firm.
My suggestion? Look at how superior companies solve problems—such as what to do with talented people who don’t fit—and make their approach yours.
2. Know Thyself.
I would have put this first, but I worried you would have tuned out because the phrase has become such a cliché.
But clichés often become clichés because they are true. Such is the case with Know thyself.
I realized the importance of self-awareness as I grew older and was transitioning to a new career. By my mid-twenties, I had ruled out working for the government or a large corporation. I had nothing against either type of institution; my problem was more personal. And the root of it involved my Dad.
I am about as proud of my father as any son I know. By any measure, Richard Sonnenfeldt lived an extraordinary life. Sent to boarding school in England in 1938, to escape the rise of Hitler in his native Germany, he got his chance to fight the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and helped to liberate the concentration camp at Dachau. He served as an interpreter for the Nuremberg war crimes trials, becoming, at the age of 23, the chief interpreter for the American prosecution.
Reunited with family in the U.S. after the war, he graduated Johns Hopkins School of Engineering in record time and held patents on color TV which he helped design as young engineer at RCA; invented a circuit used in all radar detectors in the free world since 1951, and led the team that sent the first NASA satellite into space.
I can’t imagine a better set of genes to have inherited. Unfortunately, my father’s capacious mind and amazing talent came with an emotional inflexibility and intolerance that took a toll on me as a child. Being told what to do, when, and how, would always remind me of some of my father’s worst qualities, and I would instinctively resist. It explains in large part why I became an entrepreneur.
The point of all this is not to diminish my father. It is to underscore an important point that is easy to overlook.
When facing the proverbial fork in the road, one of the things you need to ask is “what choice am I cut out for?” It’s about you—your capabilities and, critically, your emotional sensitivities and tolerance for risk. To take a simple example to make the point, if you can’t stomach the idea of sharing control of your company, then don’t take on equity partners and by all means forget about going public.
As painful as self-knowledge is, it has a huge upside: Once you recognize your weaknesses, you will also better understand your strengths.
And playing to your strengths will allow you to make better decisions.
3. Self-control.
Most successful entrepreneurs either learn—or are born with the capacity to delay gratification when necessary.
You have probably heard of the Marshmallow Test.
In 1968, Stanford’s Walter Mischel isolated individual children in a room, where he offered them a choice between receiving one marshmallow that they could eat immediately—or if they could wait 20 minutes—a lifetime for a four-year-old—they could have two.
Many couldn’t last, but a few were extremely creative at finding ways to distract themselves for the full 20 minutes and got the second treat.
Over the next 40 years, Mischel followed the lives of the 550 kids who had participated in his “Marshmallow Test.” Not only were the preschoolers who were able to wait longer more focused, confident, and self-controlled as adolescents, but they also scored 210 points higher on their SAT tests and did better in life. The results seemed to correlate more with an individual’s innate personality than with their intelligence.
Delaying gratification is only one of the many attributes you’ll need to succeed. But without it, it is highly dubious you ever will.
4. Another thing beats IQ. Grit.
This one is related to the last. Everyone faces problems and things that don’t go well. The people who succeed, coolly review the situation, come up with a plan to overcome the obstacle and frequently turned it into an advantage.
If it were easy, everyone could do it. Be one of the people who can.
5. Be Wildly Optimistic—even Delusional.
Will Ade was a successful oil explorer. In Brunei, and then Colombia his wells were drilled by Sun, BP, and Exxon. He was a proven talent. His wells got drilled.
But big corporations move slowly and, eager to get his prospects drilled faster, Will jumped ship to a smaller Texas firm. Three years later, he learned the downside of working for a small, undercapitalized company. Oil prices plunged and suddenly, Will was stuck overseas without a job.
As he told me: “All I had were return tickets to the U.S., worth about $3,000.”
But Will had two things going for him: unbridled optimism and his knack for finding oil. He was tired of depending on someone else’s decisions. So he cashed in the airline tickets and started his own wildcat exploration company.
Normal people do not risk their last $3,000 on a start-up. What fuels that kind of risk-taking is extraordinary optimism. Research shows that this optimistic bias tends to be highest among entrepreneurs and inventors.
When Will Ade started his company, that wasn’t simply an act of foolish optimism. He was a highly trained geologist and geophysicist with a world-class record at finding drillable oil reserves. He also knew that his infant company with minimal overhead would be able to under-bid the competition.
His net worth today: nine figures and growing.
I have learned that luck tends to favor those who are prepared and willing to take the risk when the right opportunity comes along.
I hope that is the case for each of you.
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