Never give up your passion for learning. And zoom out of your field before you zoom in. Some of my very best business insights have come from reading around subjects. They have come from approaching questions at a strange angle, from thinking about them from a different point of view. A lot of the knowledge that has really given me an edge in business has come from history, psychology, even chemistry. Connecting seemingly unconnected dots is what has served me well.

So any student who wants to get into psychology, right now the students are like lemmings. They say, “Well, it’s popular to study brain science, I’ll do that.” Or, “It’s popular to do neural networks; I see 30,000 people doing it, it must be good.” And my advice is if a lot of people are doing it, don’t waste your time.

The first thing to recommend is that they don’t work in some place that they don’t like, that they don’t do things that they don’t like. That they look for what they really want to do and what kind of thing they want to be involved in, or if they want to go it alone by themselves, to find that.

The challenge of a big, over-arching vision is that it's hard to know where to start. And your biggest opportunity will change from year to year. Technology changes. Competition changes. You change. My advice: Just start. Find a single unmet need that nudges the world closer to where you believe it's going. And if you hit a dead end, pivot.

I wrote about this in our first quarter client letter, actually, the concept of polycrisis, and I talked about the fact that my belief is that we've all become firefighters.

You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem.

I remember the day. It was just such a big day. It happened to be the same day that I got to be on the cover of Forbes. And I remember just being so overwhelmed by the opportunity that we had at hand, that we had closed this $1.45 billion fund - first time - probably in the top five of first-time funds ever that had been closed.

I literally said to them - all of our faces were on the - in the boxes on Zoom. And I welled up. And I said, oh my God, this is my dream. This is what I want - I've wanted to see my whole life of working at Ariel and all the things we've built, and making sure we all have a shot at this - narrowing this wealth gap, and putting our stamp on the industry and society.

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.

That moving a lot really committed me to stability and committed me to ... being in control of my destiny. That was something that was very important to me. And it also made me very conservative about money.