Transformational Education > A new way of teaching
Stephen Schwarzman (MBA 1972) on understanding strengths and weaknesses
Transcript
The course material was pretty dense, and in that sense, quite good. And if you studied all the stuff, which I always did, because I wanted to be successful. And I figured there must be a germ of stuff in there I should know. And I never was an amazing student, so, you know, I always read all the stuff. That, you know, reading the course material itself was informative. But as to the people, I mean, I wasn't worried that I was wrong, in that sense. It was hard to be really wrong, except on a course where there was computational things. And then I could be wrong. There's no doubt I was wrong. I'm not so good at computational skills and things. It never was my strength. And so I was always prepared to not be right on things like that.
And you learn that people have different strengths. You know, somebody who's weak in one thing isn't necessarily weak in another. And so, you know, this isn't self-referential to me. It's really about looking at someone else, and you got to really see everybody else, in terms of the range of what they were good at or bad at. And in some cases, you know, some classes, actually, they could be—have insight, and others they could be absolutely dim.
And that was an interesting insight. There were very few people, and I could name them, in my experience, who were strong across the board. You know, it just didn't matter, you know, these were your decathlon athletes. They could do everything right. And I had enormous respect for those people.