Jared Kushner: belief

Transcript context

…Let me ask you, you have a very interesting life. If you were to give advice to young folks on how to have such an impactful life, what would you say? Career and life, how to have a successful career and a successful life? Number one is I would say you just have to work hard at everything you do. Number two, I would say never stop learning and always try to say yes more than you should, go out of your comfort zone. And I think just, you’ve got to work hard at everything you do. And if you’re going to take something on, do it the best you can. One of the lessons I write about in the book from my father was I remember I was going for a job interview and he asked me, he says, “Well, what time are you leaving to the job interview?” It was at nine o’clock. I said, “I’ll leave at eight o’clock.” He says, “Well, what if there’s traffic?”, I said, “Dad, I’ve done this drive 1,000 times. There’s never traffic.” He said, “What if there’s an accident?”, I said, “I can’t control that.” He said, “Jared, the only excuse you ever have for being late is that you didn’t leave early enough.” And I just think it’s something where if you want to accomplish something, a lot of people I hear they complain about what other people do or why it’s hard or why it’s impossible. And again, I say this as somebody who’s been so blessed with so many things in life, but when I’ve had challenges or things I’ve wanted to achieve, I just focus and say, ” What can I do?”, and I’ll read everything I can get my hands on. If the door closes, I’ll try the window. If the window closes, I’ll try the chimney. If the chimney closes, I’ll try to dig a tunnel. It’s just, if you want to accomplish something, you just have to go at it. And I think the most important thing I’ll say, sorry, I’m thinking my way into this answer is just do the right thing. I think that’s also right. And I saw that in my career in be good to people, be honest, do the right thing. And if you do that, I think long-term, it does pay off. Maybe not in politics, but in the world at large, it does. And my hope is in politics it will as well. I wonder if you can comment on your process of learning in general because you took on so many new interesting problem, and approached them with a first principles approach. So, what was your source of information? Because you didn’t seem to be listening to the assumptions of the prior experts, you were just taking on the problem in a very pragmatic perspective. So, how’d you learn about the Middle East? How did you learn about China? How did you learn about Mexico? Prison reform? All of this that you’ve taken on and were extremely effective at?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.