Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…They have to love their job. You can’t fake this job for very long. People say, “Isn’t it really hard? Doesn’t it take over your life and everything else?” Absolutely, so if you don’t like it, this is probably not a good place for you. At the end of the day, though, being able to take a blank piece of paper and think about what’s not there is the skill that gets them from mastery of numbers, of analytics, to actual decision-making. I think back, and I’ll relate it personally for me, I started at Drexel Burnham. At Drexel, we financed companies where there was a nonzero chance their business would not exist. You spent an awful lot of time thinking about the future, the business plan, the specifics. We were not banking Exxon. Exxon was there then, it’s there now. That’s a process of maximizing the efficiency of Exxon’s particular corporate action that’s needed. Something that forces you to think about where something is going, whether the business will exist, how things will change, how you make capital commitments in the context of uncertainty is really what you want to see. You don’t see that in a 22-year-old because you see them as masters of their craft. You don’t actually know till a number of years after someone’s here whether they possess that ability, which is to bring all their outside influences, their knowledge of what’s going on in the world, to bear in the business, along with relationship. At the end of the day, this is a complex business, but it’s also a really easy business. People do business with people they like. Are you likable? Are you relatable? Are you good at building relationships? Having the right answer is helpful. Being able to convey that answer in a way that someone else will absorb and to engage in a dialogue with them — much more important. Here’s a quotation from you, I think, if you could explain it to us. “Our business, like the real estate business and some other business, is hours of boredom followed by moments of terror. We really only make 20 decisions a year.” What are you getting on about there? Well, I was really talking about . . . It’s taken out of context, but it is what I said.…

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