Mellody Hobson
speaker
238 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Mellody Hobson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You must, and I mean this with serious intensity, you have to have a sense of urgency. You have to want to be great.
I knew I would. Vision means conquering fear. Because once you decide to go out on that limb and dangle, there's like nothing to help you. There's nothing to catch you. You're like gripping by your hands, by your fingernails.
Me knowing your story, I think you'll understand very well. I grew up in Chicago, youngest of six. My siblings are much older than me. So a couple of decades.
So interestingly... I am technically an only child because they say if you have more than five years between yourself and your next sibling, and my next sibling is nine years older than me. My mom was a single mom. She worked extremely hard, but we had a hard existence and not harder than anyone else's, but our own form of challenges where despite the effort, we would get evicted.
Our phone would get disconnected. Our lights would be turned off. My mom used to borrow gas from the gas station to get me to school. And all of those things created trauma. You know, I feel like my purpose came from that trauma. And I think my fire, and I said this recently in an interview, was lit by scarcity. There was scarcity, and it made me very, very, very focused and very driven.
I mean, very. I could sit for hours and work without even looking up. The focus that I have is extreme.
No, I used to have those recurring nightmare dreams. You know, people talk about their dream was they didn't graduate from college or something like that. I still, to this day, I wake up in the morning and I look up and I speak words of gratitude or say words of gratitude to myself.
And it's interesting. Mine is not the bag packed. Mine is like the account of
It's the same concept. Being prepared and having that, not even just emergency mentality, but that mentality that anything can happen, which has proven to be true over and over again in life.
In my immediate family, I'm the only one who graduated from college. So they aren't like me. We're very, very different. But as I said, I have nothing but respect and admiration and love for the lens through which they allowed me to form a life for myself or an idea of a life for myself. In terms of what I was looking at, nothing in person, but I was reading.
And so I always told people I was mentored by people I never met because I was reading about them. And so the reading is what brought me to have the ideas that I have because I didn't have that real life experience. I didn't grow up with any relationships. I didn't grow up with any entrees. I found all those things myself. And then I was a really good student.
And what I mean by that is technically a good student at school, but I was a good study. So if I had the opportunity to observe something, I would study it really fast. So I would come here, furniture, how you looked, all sorts of things, and then take pieces of it and say, oh, that makes sense, or I want to do that, or look at how this was put together. And so that created an opportunity for me.
But I really spent a lot of my childhood in the library. I used to go to the library on Saturdays.
Like, what were you... Well, when I was really young, I used to read these biographies. They were these little red books. And they were in my school library at my public school, which is called the Ogden School. And they had a book on every person you could possibly imagine. And my goal was to read all of them. And so I read books on... How old were you at this point? I mean, I'm like...
Nine, 10, 11, 12.
Well, this was a big deal because I told people this and, you know, sometimes they're a little surprised. I couldn't read until I was in second grade. I really struggled reading, which I can't explain it. No, and I have no issues reading. I mean, once it clicked, I had a math teacher in high school. He called me the second day girl. He was like, you get everything on the second day.
I have had one job since I graduated from college in 1991. And supposedly in my graduating class of 1,100 people, I'm the only person who has had the same phone number at work the entire time. Wow. Literally.
Now, remember, I'm rooted in a sense of... A lack of security. Yes. And moving constantly as a child. So when you move a lot as a child, what don't you do as an adult? You don't want to move. You want stability. So I never wanted to move. And so I didn't want to move at home, and I didn't want to move. I lived in my first apartment that was 850 square feet. for 14 years.
when I was in 1994. And so I lived there for this long period of time because I really liked this idea of just being very, very, very stable. So the same was true at Ariel. It was very, very stable, but I was constantly challenged with new things. and they always got harder to this day.
So one thing that I felt very strongly about, and I told this to a lot of young people, first of all, and it's very important, my career is anchored in an expertise. I am anchored in finance. And that is very, very important.
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