Jared Kushner: preference

Transcript context

…It just seems like that cynicism that takes over is paralyzing. You sent me a great essay from Paul Graham. I’m a big fan of. I think it explains a lot of your success. The essay is called How to Do Great Work, and people should go definitely read the full essay. There’s a few things I could read from it, some quotes. “Having new ideas is a strange game because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you’ve seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before? Seeing something obvious sounds easy, and yet empirically having new ideas is hard.” The steps you took seem trivial, and yet nobody was taking them, or at least in the past, that weren’t successful. So the successes you’ve had were as simple as essentially picking up the phone or trying. There’s a lot of interesting things here to talk about. This aspect of doing this seemingly simple that seems to be so hard to do it, as Paul describes, requires a willingness to break rules. ” There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy breaking them and to be indifferent to them.” That’s an interesting distinction. “I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent minded.” So again, that’s to enjoy breaking the rules or being indifferent to the rules. “The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don’t merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person delight at the sheer of audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it started. The other way to break the rules is not to care about them at all, or perhaps even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field,” ignorance may be in quotes, “of a field’s assumptions act as a source of temporary, passive, independent mindedness. Aspies also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs. Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.” So the aggressive and the passive is such an interesting way of looking at it. Perhaps some aspect of this, at least in the story you told us, some passive aspect where you’re not even acknowledging, not even caring that there was rules, just kind of asking the simple question and taking the simple action. I think that it’s funny that was a necessary read and we’re doing just a snippet of it, but I would encourage anyone listening to go and find it and read the entire thing because it’s something that really spoke to me as I was transitioning into my new career now, and I just loved it. But when we were talking about why certain people who don’t have traditional qualifications are able to come in and do incredible work and solve complex problems, it made me think of that essay, which is why I shared it. I think that in the context of the work that I was doing here, perhaps not having the historical context became an advantage and obviously went back and then tried to study it. But if you go into a problem, I always find that especially in the political realm, my favorite political issues are ones where they’re contrarian by being obvious and sometimes they feel very intuitive and so you take them on. There’s always a lot of resistance when you go against something that’s been accepted as the way that you’re supposed to do things. I came to learn over the course of my time in government that when everyone was agreeing with what I was doing, then it actually made me more nervous because I felt like you have these problems, they haven’t been solved for a long time, and then if you take the same approach as others, you’re going to fail just like they did. So taking a different approach doesn’t mean you’re going to succeed, but at least if you fail, you’re going to fail in an original way. I did like this a lot and I think that what I saw was the people who were very good at getting things done that hadn’t been done before were people who came with different qualifications, different perspectives, and they came in and really worked the problem in untraditional ways. And so I think in the Middle East, I came in with a very different approach than people before me, not because I came in deliberately trying to do it differently, but because I came in trying to listen and understand from people why the problem hadn’t been solved and then think from a first principle’s perspective on what’s the right perspective today. Not based on what happened 50 years ago or not based on what somebody’s feelings who were hurt, but what’s the right thing to make people’s lives better, to make the world a safer and more prosperous place tomorrow. So if we can go back to MBS for a little bit, from the person to the vision, there’s something called Vision 2030 about his vision for Saudi Arabia in the future. Can you maybe look from his perspective, what is his vision for the region?…

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