Robert F. Smith on Building Critical Thinking Skills and Habits

In your 20s, you should be focused on two things. One is building your skills, and the other is developing habits. And skills, in this case, it's critical thinking, learning how to do analytical work, learning how to build capability, real skills. In this case, it's Excel and spreadsheets, and what are the tools and programming. And then there's the habits. And habits, of course, are broad ranging. There's a habit of treating your body right, the way you eat, the way you exercise, making sure you fulfill your commitments, making sure that you are giving praise to God, making sure that you are thinking about your community. And I said, if you build those skills, getting up in the morning, right? I said, if you build those skills and those habits, then when you hit your 30s, you will often hear something or discover something that you think is going to create an economic opportunity for you. But if you haven't built those skills and those habits, you will never be able to pursue those and be successful. And so to a great extent, my path to becoming a private equity came from skills and habits. I started my career as an engineer. I started at Bell Laboratories when I was 17 years old as an intern. But I built a skill there to understand how to do critical thinking, how to take large problems, make them into small problems, and then solve those small problems and put them together, and develop the habits of what I call outworking everyone and informing myself about what it is that I was interested in beyond the levels of anyone else in that environment.