I WAS AN ODD CHOICE for Goldman Sachs when the firm hired me, at the age of twenty-eight, to work in its storied arbitrage department ... The stereotypical personality type of the arbitrageur was, in those days, forceful and confrontational. I was then, as now, a low-key, not manifestly aggressive person. As for my qualifications, I don’t think I’d even ever heard the phrase “risk arbitrage” before I started the job search that led to Goldman Sachs.
…
The dominant emotion of my freshman year at Harvard was anxiety. For solace, I read a little inspirational book that my dad sent me, A Way of Life by William Osler ... Osler’s message was that the best way to deal with the fear of failure was to … close the door to your larger worries and focus on the task at hand. I tried to take this advice and block out questions about whether I was capable of doing the work at Harvard.
To everyone’s surprise, especially mine, my grades that year were good—so good that my academic adviser called me in for a meeting.
…
Even after freshman year, I still had a tenuous feeling about being at Harvard. At the beginning of my second year, the teacher of an English literature class was trying to figure out what books to assign that everyone hadn’t already studied. He asked for a show of hands of those wh0 had read various books—classics of English literature by Charles Dicke8 George Eliot, and William Makepeace Thackeray. The other students … put up their hands as he named more and more obscure titles by these authors. My hands remained in my lap. It wasn’t only that I hadn’t read these books; I had never even heard of most of them.
… Harvard was just the next step in … intellectual development. For me, it was all so new … that I was forced to rethink everything. Sophomore ...