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Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard, where he served[…]

A lesson from an investment banker.

Question: What should we be asking ourselves?

Ferguson: Somebody told me recently that at one of the investment banks in New York, the question that everybody is thinking when they’re looking at you is, “What are you doing for my deal?”  And I don’t think that’s the question we should be asking ourselves. 

We should be asking ourselves, “What have I done today to make the world more intelligent to me or to other people?” Because it’s understanding that we most lack, that we must strive hardest for. Anything that you do to advance the sum of human knowledge is time well spent.

 

Recorded on: Oct 15 2007

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