The organising idea arrives early and governs the rest:
“It’s just as hard to start and build a small business as a large one. You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically as you bludgeon it into existence. So if you’re going to dedicate your life to a business, which is the only way it will ever work, you should choose one with the potential to be huge.”
— Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes
That is an argument about allocation, not ambition. The effort is roughly fixed; the size of the prize is a choice made at the start.
Difficulty as a moat
The corollary is counterintuitive and useful:
“If you see a huge, transformative opportunity, don’t worry that no one else is pursuing it. You might be seeing something others don’t. The harder the problem is, the more limited the competition, and the greater the reward for whomever can solve it.”
— Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes
Competition thins as difficulty rises. Most people route around hard problems, which is precisely why the hard problems stay unclaimed.
The hiring standard
Schwarzman’s ranking is the most operational passage in the book:
“Eights just do the stuff you tell them. Nines are great at executing and developing good strategies. You can build a winning firm with 9s. But people who are 10s sense problems, design solutions, and take the business in new directions without being told to do so.”
— Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes
He treats the selection ratio as the mechanism, not a boast:
“Pete and I always resolved to hire 10s. For our 2018 class of junior investment analysts, we received 14,906 applications for 86 spots. Our acceptance rate is 0.6 percent, much lower by far than the most selective universities in the world.”
— Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes
Where to be sceptical
The book is unusually free of doubt. Where Knight keeps the humiliations in, Schwarzman narrates a career in which the calls mostly worked, and the reader is rarely shown the reasoning behind one that did not. Read the 10s framework as a genuinely useful standard, and read the certainty around it as the genre’s occupational hazard.
