Ask, Listen, and Empathize
Nature vs. Nurture, Tough Talks, Beauty, Goldman Sachs
"Everybody is a winner until it's inconvenient for them.” — Chet Holmgren
Hey Coaches,
Here you go!
✍️ Articles
Harvard Business Review - How Great Coaches Ask, Listen, and Empathize: Ed Batista explains that while coaching is about inspiring people to do their best, it’s also about challenging people to come up with answers on their own.
When you coach as a leader you don’t need to be the expert. You don’t need to be the smartest or most experienced person in the room. And you don’t need to have all the solutions. But you do need to be able to connect with people, to inspire them to do their best, and to help them search inside and discover their own answers.
10 Tips for Being Happily 85 Years Old (Like Me): Roger Rosenblatt, author of Rules for Aging, shares 10 tips to be happily 85 years old.
Nobody’s thinking about you.
Make young friends.
Try to see fewer than five doctors.
Get a dog.
Don’t hear the cheers.
Everyone’s in pain.
Listen for Bob Marley.
Join a gang.
On regrets.
Start and end every day by listening to Louis Armstrong.
🎙️ Podcast
EconTalk - Nature vs. Nurture (with Paul Bloom): How much of our success or failure is written in our genes? EconTalk's Russ Roberts and psychologist Paul Bloom discuss why the nature vs. nurture question in a thought-proving manner. [5/26/25 - 68 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube
Supercommunicators - 3. How to Have the Hardest Conversations: Psychologist Jay Van Bavel talks with Charles Duhigg about strategies for having the tough conversations and how to make them easier to navigate. [3/13/25 - 31 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube
💭 Miscellaneous
Legendary Investor Jim Simons on being guided by beauty:
“You might think 'building a company that's trading bonds, what's so aesthetic about that?' What's aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, approaching the problem, and doing it right it's a beautiful thing to do something right.”
We tend to place excessive trust in whichever guru made a good call last time. As a Lehman Brothers investment strategist, Garzarelli brilliantly urged clients to get out of the stock market the week before the Black Monday crash in 1987. That made her one of the most widely quoted strategists on the Street; her words would move markets, and she compiled a good track record. But she was fallible — in December 2007, on the eve of the global financial crisis, she proclaimed that stocks were undervalued by 25% — and people lost interest.
📺 Video
David Solomon - Goldman Sachs | Investment Conference 2025 | Norges Bank Investment Management (15 minutes)
Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon covers the characteristics that help Goldman maintain a strong culture, how the firm avoids complacency, and more.