Chapter 11

You Can’t Really Be Good at Everything . . . and That’s OK!

Recently on a shoot in Austin, I went back to my hotel room to rest up for the next morning. As usual, I woke up early. People have asked me how long I’ve been waking up at 4 a.m. to do my morning show. My usual reply is: “For so long that 6 a.m. is considered sleeping in.”

The sad part is that’s one hundred percent true. When I worked in newspapers, I would stay up all night writing my stories. I’m not sure why because my editors were all in London which meant the last deadline was usually around 6 p.m. East Coast time. There was no need for me to stay up all night filing a story that would not have been looked at until the next morning. Sometimes I think I wrote best when I knew my editors were asleep and not hounding me for the piece.

My night owl persona disappeared when I had my twins. No baby allows a mother to sleep until 10 a.m. I began watching lots of ­morning shows. I began to dream about being on one of those ­morning shows. Early morning hours felt like peace, before the babies began fussing and the day’s work started. I came to understand why productive, type-A personalities liked to rise before dawn and head to the gym.

Which is all to say that on the morning in Austin, I woke up two hours earlier than I needed to—at 5 a.m.—and clicked onto a documentary on Bravo TV called First Position. It was about children who excelled in ballet, competing annually in New York for a rare spot at an elite ballet company. The storylines were all interesting, but the character that impacted me the most was a minor one. He was Jules Fogarty, the little brother of one of the more exceptional ballet dancers featured in the film, Miko Fogarty. For all his boyish charm, Jules was a personable but mediocre performer. Without the slightest bit of sympathy, the Russian teacher barked at him for not sucking in his belly. Jules stumbled around on stage. While his swan-like sister practiced late into the night, he was filmed snoring away on the mat.

To nobody’s surprise except his mother, Jules quit ballet. He was a happier boy now, playing video games on his computer. When the documentary filmmakers interviewed his mother, she was sobbing away, expressing dismay for his decision to quit. “He said I don’t have passion for ballet,” his mother said in her Japanese accent. “I didn’t imagine,” she continued, wiping away her tears, “. . . when he quit I’m so sad.”

At that point, I wanted to do that thing you’re not supposed to do sitting in a hotel room by yourself, which was talk to the TV. I wanted to say “He’s doing you a favor. He’s not doing ballet because he’s not very good at it and it only takes a 10-year-old to figure that out. And that’s okay.”

Bob Knight would understand what I’m talking about. Bob is one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, known as much for his victories as for his temper. Whenever someone hears his name, they mention the “chair incident.” You know the scene—the one where he threw a plastic chair across the basketball court after arguing over a foul call. He even made a commercial out of it for Volkswagen.

Bob must have been having a good day when he walked into our New York studio to talk about his new book, The Power of Negative Thinking, because not only did I escape unscathed, but he agreed to chat after. The point that got him really fired up again was when I asked him about the parents of the players he recruits.

Every parent, he says, thinks their child is the next Kobe Bryant. The problem is not everyone is going to be good at everything and he wished parents would stop telling their children they could be whatever they wanted to be.

“I don’t know how well society makes realistic statements to kids, sets up realistic opportunities to kids,” he said. “It goes back to the ‘whatever you want to be’ thinking. Here’s a classic example. When Mike Krzyzewski was at West Point, as a sophomore, I can’t remember if I was first or second year as head coach, I said to him, ‘We’ve got guys that can score better than you can, and can shoot better than you can. What I expect out of you is for you to handle the ball, make sure you’re careful with it, hand it to the people who can score like Jimmy Oxley. You can’t let Jimmy get in trouble.’ Mike understood that and did a very good job for us. That was carried over to his coaching [Mike later himself became one of the most famous coaches in college basketball, breaking Bobby Knight’s record for wins].

“A lot of people don’t want to tell people they can’t do this,” he continued. “That lends itself to problems internally. But you’re far better off telling people what they can’t do to what they can do. Let them know that they’re doing a good job.”

Which doesn’t mean you can’t dream big. It only means that you dream where you have the biggest chance of success. And that’s OK. Part of being an immensely successful person is to know what you’re not good at. The problem is when someone believes he or she can do anything, when the talent clearly does not match up to the goal. Instead of a life of success, there is only disappointment and resentment.

Mario Gabelli is one of the most successful fund managers on Wall Street. He’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars and still goes to work loving what he does. He’s become rich in much the same way Warren Buffett has become uber-rich: by evaluating stocks and buying them for less than their intrinsic value.

Every success story has a beginning and Mario’s began in the Bronx, where he was born. At the height of the 1970s recession, Mario Gabelli decided he wanted to start managing people’s money so he decided to form his own firm.

“I made a decision in October of 1976 to start a broker–dealer. I didn’t do the money management business because I didn’t have the confidence yet I could raise money,” Mario said. “But I knew I could make money for clients. On January 1, 1977, I started writing research, I was approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, I had to lease space, get typewriters, letterheads, stationary. . . . I was able to get software, computer systems at a wholesale price.”

Like any startup entrepreneur, Mario knew what he was good at and pursued it with a singular focus, even if it meant being his first and only employee. “At the time I was starting up, the telephone company was on strike, there were no payphones in our building so I was out on the street in a pay booth in the winter storm when one of my buddies passed by and said, ‘Mario, when you said you were located on Wall Street, you really meant Wall Street!’”

Knowing what you’re good at is actually a very difficult thing to do. It may sound easy but most people are in denial that they’re bad at anything. Research shows, for instance, that most people think they’re above-average drivers. You probably think you are, too.

Dan Portillo, the head of talent at the venture capital firm Greylock, sees this a lot. Entrepreneurs often have a hard time letting go control of the company they created. When I asked Dan how many of his entrepreneurs actually make good managers, he said, “My list of people that I think are phenomenal managers is pretty short.” He went on to name four people out of the dozens of companies he manages in the Greylock portfolio. “Justin Fitzhugh who’s now at Jive Software . . . he’s a really great manager. I remember Justin was managing three teams that had nothing to do with each other but he just knew how to ask the right questions and get people focused around the right things. I think management is a skill that we don’t really teach in Silicon Valley.

“The hardest point is when [the entrepreneurs] start to get that little bit of success for the first time and when you start dealing with growth, success, customers, and supporting those customers, that is when you figure out if someone is a good manager, too.”

One of the smartest moves Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, made was hiring Sheryl Sandberg. Where Zuckerberg was seen as the boy genius, she was the adult who knew how to run a growing company. Despite whispers at one point that Facebook may be the next Pets.com fiasco, the company is recovering from its disastrous initial public offering and growing like a steady, mature company with solid leadership.

Once you find the thing you’re good at and you work tirelessly at it, that’s when the possibilities open up.

Part of this goes back to something Warren Buffett said to me. He mentioned that students constantly ask him, “How do you find your passion? How do you know what you’re good at?” As Buffett told his students, you just keep looking for it until you do. It’s like looking for your soul mate—once you know it’s right, it’s right. It’s in your gut.

Jamie Dimon could have become the home improvement king—but he listened to his gut and knew that was not his passion. Banking was in his blood. He described what happened after he was fired from Citigroup.

“The guys who ran Home Depot—Ken Langone and Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank—called me up to discuss the CEO job before I went to Bank One. And I actually went down there and met with them and stayed at Arthur’s house and went for lunch with them. I told them ‘I have to confess that until you called me up, I had never been in a Home Depot.’ They said, ‘Oh we don’t care, we like you as a person, the character, the integrity, the work ethic, we’ll teach you.’

“They knew I wasn’t going to B.S. them. But I would have been incapable of stepping into that job of CEO. I mean, I could not walk through a store and tell you whether it was a well-run store or not. I couldn’t tell you whether the inventory was right, the merchandise was right.”

“Did you walk through a Home Depot?” I asked.

“Yes, not just one but many with these guys.”

“And you said, forget it?”

“No, no, I loved the whole thing. I loved everything about them, I loved the business. But the way I look at it, I needed to go back to what was really on my mind. Banking was the craft I’d been practicing for 20 years and I loved it. I understood trading floors and bank branches. I was confident I could run a financial company well. Moving outside of finance wouldn’t have felt natural for me. It was more like if you play tennis your whole life and then you’re told to go play golf.”

********

Back in Austin, I started to think more about why Jules resonated with me.

Maybe because I saw a little of myself in Jules.

When I was 12, my parents declared I would start to learn piano. My father had always threatened the possibility, but finally with the family more settled in Philadelphia and some time now on our hands, he found a music school for me to attend.

I could tell this was a real passion of his. He was very busy at the hospital, so for him to do actual research to find the best music school in the area and the best teacher meant he was serious. I remember being dragged on a rainy night (anything you don’t want to do happens on a rainy weekday night) to the school, where my parents promptly registered me.

“You do want to play, don’t you?” he asked me repeatedly and earnestly, to which I smiled meekly, “Of course! I do want to play.” Lies, lies, lies.

My piano teacher was not nice. She was a fairly plump woman with Cher-like long hair and she did not smile kindly on me. My parents may have been clueless but she could tell right away I was not an admirer of her craft. She eyed my fingers and seemed to doubt right away they could stretch to the keys. She gave me what I thought were the most boring pieces of music to play, just to see if I would tough it out.

I dreaded each of those sessions but they went on for a year. When I heard she was leaving the school, I secretly smiled that this may be my excuse to stop the lessons. But instead, my parents asked that I continue the lessons at her house. God forbid, now I had to go to her dark, stuffy house.

And so I trudged over to her home for a few months more until finally, one day, either she couldn’t take it anymore or I couldn’t but she sat down exasperated and eyed me close.

“You don’t really like playing, do you?”

“No, I really don’t,” I replied. “But my Mom and Dad think I can and want me to.”

“Okay,” she said, biting her lip. “You’re . . . okay. You’re not going to win any competitions. But if your parents are going to pay for these lessons, you may as well play something you like.”

So together, for one reason or another, we picked the theme song to the sitcom, Cheers.

Unbeknownst to my parents, for a few months more, while they thought I was perfecting Johann Sebastian Bach’s Minuet in G Major, I was opening the bar for Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. I memorized it all.

On Chinese New Year, my relatives all gathered at our house to celebrate.

“Si Si,” my father called out to me, using my nickname. “Come play for your aunts and uncles what you learned.”

You know how the story ends.

By the time I finished, there was dead silence. My relatives, many of whom had just arrived in the United States, thought it might have been a classical arrangement they missed because they were sheltered in China. My father made off as if he knew all along I was learning this.

But I heard nothing more. The lessons were cancelled and I never had to see Cher again.

The piano sits in his living room today, like a tombstone. It hasn’t been tuned in years—actually, decades. I dare not play Cheers on it or else I might elicit a flashback. Although a few years ago, Dad did finally say to me, “I guess you never really liked it.”

“No, I hated it.”

But at least I knew what I was good at.