Stephen Schwarzman’s Counterintuitive Formula for Excellence

Most people chase prestige and hope passion follows. Stephen Schwarzman, who built Blackstone into one of the world’s largest private equity firms, argues the sequence runs the other way around.

“Devote your time and energy to the things you enjoy. Excellence follows enthusiasm, and doing anything solely for prestige rarely leads to success.”

— Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes

This is harder advice to follow than it sounds. Prestige is visible and legible — it signals status to others and feels like progress. Enthusiasm is messier. It’s internal, harder to justify in a job interview or to skeptical parents, and it offers no guarantees. But Schwarzman’s point is precisely that the pursuit of external validation is a weak engine. It might get you to a prestigious title or a recognizable firm, but it rarely produces the sustained, compounding effort that genuine excellence demands. You simply can’t outwork someone who loves what they’re doing.

The practical takeaway isn’t to quit your job and chase a passion project. It’s to audit where your real energy goes — the problems you think about without being asked, the work that doesn’t feel like work. Those signals matter. Schwarzman built a career by doubling down on what genuinely engaged him, and the results speak for themselves. Before optimizing your strategy, it’s worth asking whether you’re playing the right game in the first place.