Stuart Miller
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Stuart Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I'll notice it when I'm working with somebody else on a reference process or on a given human decision. And I'm like, I feel no need to make up my mind. There's all this evidence on both sides on X. It would be useful to make up my mind. It's like, I'll just keep eating the grass over here and then I'll go over here. It can be maddening for people who are working with me.
Yeah.
It probably makes me frustrating to work with at times. But then I think friends would say like, then I can act very decisively. much faster than they would think when it lines up.
A metaphor that Sam Harris uses when you're trying to get someone to understand the non-dual perspective is And his point is just that if you and I were looking out this window and there was a very strong reflection, but you were focused on the building outside, that using language to get you to see the reflection is very hard. And I like it in the hiring context because...
I think many people are blind to the way that they're creating the interaction themselves with the other person. And so if you're interviewing somebody, the example I use in my essay is like, if you're interviewing somebody and you're nervous and holding your breath yourself, often they will start to do that. And then you experience them as nervous, but actually you are the prime mover on that.
That's why references using the interview is just one piece. And then what's so hard is The interview is so vivid in your mind, you're inclined to really weight it. But the reality is if you can do really good references, then you can control for the fact that you've created the other person.
We've talked earlier about containers and how different the reality is in each container. And I think of the water as they're making sense of reality based on their lived experience within a given field and within a given company. And you don't want to take somebody out of reality. water that's working really well and just assume it applies somewhere else.
And trying to think of an example, if you were working at Goldman Sachs in the 90s, there was a certain way of doing business That if you took that person out, somebody who's extremely commercial and extremely successful, and you put them in a different firm with a different style of doing business, they could be seen as super sharp elbowed or super something.
And just being conscious of how different it is moving from container to container. And they aren't necessarily aware. They will not control for that themselves. So you have to control for it.
Nine.
I feel like that's something I aspire to for my kids is because I feel like that experience for me. It locked in this sense of my identity being I can outwork other people if I just try hard enough. So when I subsequently hit challenges like having launched East Rock a year before the great financial crisis, I had this underlying confidence that it could only get so bad somehow.
Because I can always fall back on working hard. I've seen it before, so it's tangible in this way. Like, I believe it in my bones. And that underlying confidence that I'll figure it out, I feel like when a kid has that or a grown-up has that, it allows you to operate from integrity in periods where it's stressful.
There's a lot of pain tolerance. So the races, depending on how fast you row, it's 2000 meters. And in a single, you'll do it between like seven and eight minutes. And so that's a length. It's not a sprint and it's not a marathon. You're producing an incredible amount of lactic acid.
Yeah. Yeah. There's a threshold of, okay, I'm going to get used to the pain and be okay with that. There was also a big difference between... I first won a couple of national championships in the double, and it was striking how different it is to be out in the water with just one other person compared to being just yourself out there and how there's nowhere to hide. And so I feel like I learned...
Partly just a training mindset. I was fortunate in that the club I worked at was mainly training national team members, like adult national team members. We had fancy boats and we were videoed in every practice. You'd go home and watch video. and constantly work on your technique.
And so that training mentality that my friend Josh Waitzkin is very focused on applying to any profession today is that confidence that the investment in the training pays off was one thing I learned. And that you could always, this optimism, you can always tweak it a little bit and make it slightly better. My dad always said I was very coachable. which I think is true.
So I was able to evolve my technique, I think, pretty effectively and pretty quickly because I just wanted to win. I didn't experience much friction. Did anything formative happen to you at Yale? One was just the experience of being with so many ambitious, smart people kind of blew my mind. My freshman year, I was in a program called Directed Studies.
You had to apply to get into, and it was 60 kids, and you had full professors teaching you classics. And I was in this philosophy class, and of the 60 kids, seven of them were from St. Ann's, the school in Brooklyn. And I'd gone to public school in New Hampshire, and two of the St. Ann's kids were reading Plato in the Greek. At first, I mistook one of them as the TA.
And when I remember calling my parents saying, I don't think I'm going to make it. Definitely in directed studies, I knew they'd yell if this is what the standard is. The other thing was you're writing a paper a week. It was intense. And they called it directed suicide at the time. I'm sure that's no longer allowed as a term. But
I was at that guy's wedding, George's wedding, 15 years later, and I'm sitting at a round table where it was all directed studies alums. And somebody else told that exact story. It turned out half the table had called their parents because George was reading Plato in the Greek. So...
Showing 241–260 of 308 · page 13 of 16
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