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
When I looked at the greats, no matter who they were, from Warren Buffett to Steve Jobs to, you name the person, Jamie Dimon, you could look at Walt Disney, you could look at just so many greats. They did one thing extremely well and they went deep. And I tell people, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less. So that's not my quote. It's a quote that I read.
So you know more and more about less and less. And so think about it. I said, there's a difference between a general practitioner where you just go to the doctor and they're checking you out and brain surgery. So I wanted to be the brain surgeon of my field. How did you choose finance? Because money, I was desperate to understand money as a child.
So that's what I mean by my trauma became my purpose. I really wanted to understand very early on how money worked so that I would not repeat the cycles that I was in. And so really it all made a lot of sense to me. Once I got there, and this is really important, I said, I want to be known for something that I do so well that it distinguishes me.
So in finance, one of the things that I do really, really well is I have a great ability to communicate ideas. And I would read the people who could do it very well. And there was a guy who wrote for Barron's Magazine, which is a weekly financial magazine named Floyd Norris. He wrote the beginning article every week. He was genius, genius writer.
And then I would read Warren Buffett's annual letters, genius, genius, genius, where they would simplify ideas. Such hard concepts. Warren Buffett would talk about everyone thinks he's looking for a needle in a haystack. He's like, I own Coca-Cola. I just look for haystacks. So that just that idea of like, look for a haystack, not a needle.
And so I would read what they would write and I'd say, well, one, I want to be able to write extremely well about money and I want to be able to communicate this concept. to anyone who could be a bus driver, a CFO, a school teacher. And to do that actually is harder than, you know, if you are a scientist and you're only speaking to PhDs, you have a common language, you have a lot of jargon.
If you're trying to break down that science to everyday people, you have to figure out how to put it in terms that they can understand. And I wanted to be able to do it all. And it's not even a question of high, low. It's a question of being clear, concise, and simple about things that can be very hard to explain.
So one of the things that I love so much that I will tell you, for years and years, I started off working on television. I worked on Good Morning America for a decade, and then I worked on CBS. As an expert, right?
Right. And the great thing about that is you get so few minutes and you must simplify. Right. And so what I would do on my way to the studio when it would be, you know, four in the morning, five in the morning, I'd sit in the front seat of the black town car and speak to the driver. And I would run my script by the driver.
And I would say to him or her, every single time I say something you don't understand, stop me. And so I used them as my focus group, just the car ride. And I would go over and over and over again. And so that was one way that I would hear. And Diane Sawyer in the beginning, she would call me in the middle of the night. She's like, I've read your script. I don't understand this.
It would be like two in the morning. And she was like, Melody, you have to explain it. I don't understand. And she was the one who always kept pushing me to simplify and explain things in a better way. And then I started to realize the power of that. Because once you could break it down, even that, you know, it's...
I think people think someone with jargon is smarter, and I actually feel the opposite. Most of the time when people give me acronyms, I say, what does that stand for? All the time. Do you know how many people can't tell you what the acronym means? All the time, yes. Which I think is hilarious. So it says a lot. It's one of the reasons I don't like acronyms at all.
You have a small child. My daughter's 11. I know you have several children around her same age. Something's wrong with your child. You are with a doctor. A doctor speaks to you only in doctor speak.
If it were a child, you'd say, break that down and explain it to me in a way that I can understand because you are not walking out of that office with something wrong with your child without understanding. I said, why do we allow people to do that with us with money? It's significant what you need to know. It could not only affect your life, but the life of your heirs.
So you need to ask that follow-up question. I don't know what you're talking about. Just as if someone said, you know, your daughter broke her femur in three places. If you didn't know what femur was, you'd say, what is that? And they'd say broken leg, right? So it's the same sort of thing. But I think the simplification of the concepts is, is the power of it. And that's what I started to see.
I was like, wait a minute. If I can simplify this, I actually have more people who are leaning in because sometimes they actually want to borrow the ideas and use these ideas in their own way. And then also what it allowed me to do, it forced me to break these things down for myself. I was always kind of saying like, how could I think about this differently? What does this mean?
How do I understand it? And if I'm in a boardroom, if I'm in anywhere, I'm just not, I always, people know that about me. I will ask if I don't know. I think questions are the most powerful things you can do in life. Yes. I prefer questions to statements.
It's a terrible trait. Just like not being curious on its own. How about the fact you sit down with someone and by the end of dinner, they haven't asked you one thing. It's unforgivable. I literally, I am like, well, they're, you know, they may be successful for now.
I know I would. I remember being very young. I remember walking into our office one day and I remember looking at the door and I said, how many times am I going to walk through this door in my life? I knew. I knew. Part of what I knew was that I was working with great people. Someone gave me advice once. They said, you know, people make really important business decisions for the wrong reasons.
And they encouraged me never to make important business decisions based upon money. Never.
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