At 14 years old, Warsh worked setting up kegs and hauling ice at the Saratoga, New York, racetrack before later earning a promotion selling programs and pencils to bettors streaming through the gates.
“Merit really carried the day,” Warsh said. “As you show up in your job—in government or in the private sector—with skills, with knowledge, with insight, and also huge amounts of humility, age and rank seem to matter a lot less in almost every place where I’ve been.”
“Title was the least important thing,” he added. “Ability to contribute to the team, to execute, were much more appropriate.”
“The key to being a better leader is to go find better leaders and learn from them,” Warsh said. “We only come to know who we are, we only come to reveal ourselves by interacting with other people.”
It’s a lesson that didn’t come naturally for Warsh. He has described himself as a long-time introvert and thus, early in his career, he had to push himself outside his comfort zone to engage more directly with those he could learn from.
“I guess there are people that are probably born great leaders,” he said. “But for most of us, we end up being around really good leaders and really bad leaders. And it’s incumbent upon us to try to pick up those good skills and to avoid the bad skills.”
“I’ve never been one who thinks that you can go into the Barnes & Noble section of the bookstore on leadership and read a few books and have it figured out,” Warsh added. “That’s just not my experience, either from my own experience, or from the people that I’ve been around. They have learned from the best and frankly, learned from the worst.”
It’s not just Warsh who argues leadership is best learned through lived experience; It’s a view echoed by both the current and former heads of the Federal Reserve.
“Embracing change and taking risks can be an important part of your development as a professional and as a person,” Powell added. “Your formal education may end today, but you are not done learning. Many of the important things you will need to know can only be learned through experience. And experience can be a hard but irreplaceable teacher.”
