You can teach someone with basic smarts to be smarter; you can't teach cultural fit or personality. But you also want someone who has a passion to win; someone that is all in.
Mellody HobsonRead
Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Race is a sensitive topic that often leads to discomfort in conversation.
Mellody Hobson highlights the discomfort surrounding discussions of race in America, comparing it to the dangerous 'third rail' in public transport. This metaphor underscores the societal hesitation to engage with such a critical and contentious issue, suggesting that the topic of race is so charged that many prefer to avoid it entirely, despite its importance in understanding social dynamics.
Themes
RaceDiscomfortConversationSocietyAmerica
In practice
Example use cases
During a community meeting about social issues, this quote can be used to address the hesitance to talk openly about race.
More from Mellody Hobson
All quotes →Observe your environment. Invite people into your life that don't look like you or think like you
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Black women have a kind of advantage over white women in the workplace. They go in prepared to face some discrimination, so when it happens, they aren't shocked.
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I can't tell you how many resumes we get from business schools across the country from black women and black men and Hispanic women, men, etcetera, who say I'm interested in working for your company because they can see someone at the top who looks like them.
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The way I go about it is that we should all be inviting people into our lives who don't look like us, speak like us and don't come from where we come from.
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I was desperate to understand money. Not to make it, to understand it. I wanted to know how it worked, and I wanted to know so that I would have enough and would be able to make good financial decisions. That led me to Ariel.
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