Top 40 Mellody Hobson Quotes

I take vitamins when I wake up. One of them I need to take is to wake up my brain. It has some caffeine in it, and it stimulates my brain and I’m literally not a person without it.

You can teach someone with basic smarts to be smarter; you can’t teach cultural fit or personality. But you also want someone who has a passion to win; someone that is all in.

There’s nothing wrong with being help. But it’s very wrong that we presume people of colour are in a subservient position. That’s problematic.

When you feel house poor, you don’t buy anything. Housing immediately impacts the job numbers because there are so many housing-related jobs within the industry, and in adjacent industries.

The way I go about it is that we should all be inviting people into our lives who don’t look like us, speak like us and don’t come from where we come from.

The average American has 11 jobs in their lifetime, and I’ve only had one.

I’ve used some of my differences as a way to stand out and to hopefully count and matter – and hopefully create an opportunity for others.

Diverse perspectives lead to a better outcome. There’s so much data, when you look at the math, in terms of the investor returns and the shareholder value that gets created from more diverse boards.

I don’t want to be a victim. I want to be a victor.

People can be sensitive, so if I need to, I’ll suck it up and be more flowery. I’ll do what it takes to get the outcome I want. As I like to say, sometimes you have to crouch to conquer.

I think the one thing about the Zoom calls is unlike being in a room with people where you can look away or drift off, I feel like with Zoom, everyone’s face is just dead center, head on, there is no drifting. It takes a lot of energy from me.

The role of a board of directors is to be a sounding board for the vision of the company – to hold executives accountable in executing that vision and to ensure a management succession plan is in place.

The first thing I do after waking up is check my phone for news. I like to make sure the world is still here and understand what happened overnight.

I had very big dreams for myself, and I wanted to work really hard, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t leave anything on the field. And that’s how I’ve always lived my life.

When people look at all the things I do, they say it’s overwhelming, but I don’t feel overwhelmed. I get it done. I’m very organized, and it’s all tied together.

I love Obama. And Michelle. I was so grateful for them. They were such stunning people. We were lucky to have them. They were great symbols for our society.

We cannot afford to be color-blind, we have to be color-brave.

I honestly think I’m going to rot my brain with all the news. I’m a news junkie.

I was desperate to understand money. Not to make it, to understand it. I wanted to know how it worked, and I wanted to know so that I would have enough and would be able to make good financial decisions. That led me to Ariel.

How many people, though, do I meet that I think have talent? Well actually a lot. That’s what drives my enthusiasm in the conversation about diversity.

I know that my life is a miracle and because of that, I can’t think my success is because I was so great at this, that or the other. A lot of things happened and came together. A lot of people went out of their way for me.

Being aware of challenges doesn’t make them sting less, but once you see them, you can assess the best way to handle them.

I was in the Woodrow Wilson School of international relations and public policy at Princeton. You have to apply to get in, and I did not originally get in. I lobbied really hard and called many people. I just would not take no for an answer.

Norman Rockwell – even though we think of him as a great American artist, in a lot of museums he has not garnered that kind of attention. And it’s this kind of accessibility that we’re trying to bring – not looking down on any art.

I grew up going to a school where there weren’t a lot of black kids. And so my mother, from a very, very young age, has sensitized me to race.

I found my own orthodontist, my own high school. I set up interviews and did college trips. Despite her incredible concern and caring, my mom didn’t have the capacity for that. It was outside her experience, and she knew I was on top of it.

Black women have a kind of advantage over white women in the workplace. They go in prepared to face some discrimination, so when it happens, they aren’t shocked.

When I wanted the CEO of Starbucks to keep me in mind for their board, I sent him a note rather than calling. I call it dripping: You don’t want to be like a faucet full-on; you want to drip just enough that they don’t forget about you.

Sometimes those apartments we lived in weren’t finished, sometimes the rooms would be heated by the gas stove, sometimes we would heat our water on hot plates to take baths, and that was very sobering, especially as a child.

Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie.

Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is overcoming it.

Even though I will never be evicted again, I am haunted by those times and still work relentlessly.

We don’t prognosticate macroeconomic factors, we’re looking at our companies from a bottom-up perspective on their long-run prospects of returning.

I’ve never met Colin Kaepernick, but he’s a hero of mine. I’m in awe that he took it upon himself to publicly promote the American values of life and liberty that we all cherish.

On my worst day I always tell myself I’m not in a field picking cotton.

When you grow up in America today, most schools don’t teach you about money and investing. You could literally take a class in woodshop or auto in high school and not take a class on money.

Sometimes I feel like I could have been a Depression-era person, just because of my need to make sure that I’m conservative in how I think about money.

I can’t tell you how many resumes we get from business schools across the country from black women and black men and Hispanic women, men, etcetera, who say I’m interested in working for your company because they can see someone at the top who looks like them.

Having a financially illiterate society is dangerous, and we have to do something about that.

I always felt very insecure financially as a child. I was desperate to understand money as a child. I was desperate to be secure. Because I always felt like the rug could be pulled from under me.