I think it’s very different in what I do. Edison’s work was so much tinkering and trying it out and empirical testing. So much of my work is writing. I don’t know what you call the writing, it’s true that the actual inspiration, say for writing an essay, the outlining of it is probably a 15-minute to half-hour procedure, then you may spend about 20 hours writing it. But the writing isn’t perspiration in the same sense. It’s not inspiration, but it’s something in between. Any profession has a vast amount of tedium attached to it. There’s no sense not admitting it. If you’re passionate about it, tedium can be — not exactly a joy — but can be perfectly tolerable. The tedium of a pianist is 10 hours of practice a day or whatever, not all of which is inspirational. The tedium of an experimental scientist is calibrating the machines and doing it over and over again. The tedium of a paleontologist is poring over a microscope, or using a dental pick to chip away the sand grains from the fossil, or looking at the statistical figures in the columns of a computer printout. Every profession has massive tedium, that’s certainly true. You cannot be a successful professional (without it). But I think if you’re committed to it, as they say, it goes with the territory. It’s part of the work.

I don’t remember which writer said this, but in an interview, a prolific novelist was asked, “Do you write only when you’re inspired, or do you write all the time? Do you wait for the muse, or do you just kind of knock it out? You can just sort of spin it out?” And he said, “Well, I do wait for the muse. I write when the muse comes, but fortunately she shows up, like me, every day at 9:00 a.m.

I keep office hours. I work from 9:30 to 6:00. It’s curious. In the morning, I could just about tie my shoelaces before noon, but I can write. It’s obviously a different part of my brain that’s working.

Do I have a muse? Well, I don’t know if this is an adequate answer, but I suppose my muse is the people of South Africa. I’ve often said that the little — or maybe the lot — I know about loving and hating was taught me by South Africa. Now that’s a big debt. When you owe that much to a situation that has shaped your conscience, your heart, your whole life, you’re profoundly indebted.

So I started with this idea of could we do private equity totally differently than had been done? One of the major features of what we do is something called demand aggregation, where we go to corporations and what we call the CPO, the purchasing officers of those - chief purchasing officers. We developed a council of Fortune 500 companies.

Our business everyday is to make money for people. And I take it as seriously as doctors who are trying to cure cancer, because by giving people financial freedom, we allow them to do great things in their lives - from retire to send their kids to college, to buy their first house, to fund a business that they might want to start.

We cannot afford to be color blind. We have to be color brave. We have to be willing, as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists, we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do, because our businesses and our products and our science, our research, all of that will be better with greater diversity.

He says: Take your gloves off, Mellody, but use your power for good. He's giving me my hands back. Use your power for good. And I have never - I've used that analogy in all things in my life, something as simple as getting my hands back, using my powers for good in the water but also day-to-day life using your power for good no matter who you are.

silver bullet is probably incentives. I think that if corporate America really said, "you're not going to get your full bonus if you don't have a diverse team working for you," I think we'd see some changes, really, really fast.

And all the while I was growing up, of course, there were just constant conversations about money and money being tight and how are we going to make ends meet and sometimes not having enough money. And it really just made me committed to living a life with much more financial security.