Carla A. Harris quotes: feedback from the Wall Street vet.
“There’s only one person responsible for your career, and that’s you.”
“Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.”
“No one else can be you.”
“People who repeatedly find career success learn to broaden their perspective and understand that there are always several roads to getting where you want to go.”
“You must define what success looks like. If you aren’t clear about what success looks like, you will create a tremendous amount of frustration.”
“Set out the goals that you want to achieve and set out your own timelines that would exist if this framework wasn’t in place. Do not spend time on the thing that you cannot see and you cannot predict.”
“If you want to maximize your success, you must use everything in your tool chest: your academic background, experiential learning and your network.”
“Spend a lot of time with yourself and get to know yourself well! If you don’t know who you are, you will easily get distracted.”
“You can’t be what I call selectively-motivated, where you can only work hard and smart when things are going well.”
“Diversity takes intentionality, accountability and consistency.”
“You have to keep consistency if you want to see the outcomes.”
“There isn’t one single industry where innovation isn’t the competitive advantage.”
“Innovation cannot exist while people are afraid to fail. Fear of failure prevents people from trying new things, and you cannot innovate without some failed experiments.”
“Teach innovation. By teaching people to fail, it will enhance innovation. Celebrate failures and learn from them.”
“Foster an environment where failure is celebrated.”
“Information is a commodity. The differentiator is are you willing to take risks? Take Risks. You must be comfortable taking risks.”
“What’s the worst that can happen? If you take a risk and it doesn’t work out, failure always brings you a gift, and that gift is experience.”
“The way you differentiate yourself is by taking risks.”
“The price of inaction is greater than the cost of making a mistake.”
“One of the key components of your mistake recovery strategy is to just stop, learn, get rid of the emotion and the feeling of shame and burden, and move on.”
“To think creatively, a mistake is almost as valuable as a success.”
“Celebrate the mistakes.”
“If it doesn’t work this time, it informs your next decision.”
“All of my pearls were acquired by making mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Choose to learn and grow from them.”
“Fear has no place in your success equation.”
“Fear informs your next step. If we stop to evaluate our failure, we can learn valuable lessons about what not to do, but also, what we need to try next, and through trial and error, we innovate.”
“At the end of every week ask yourself, ‘What did I fail at this week?’ and then congratulate yourself, learn from your mistake, and improve for next time.”
“One of the laws of the professional jungle is that every dog has their day. Everyone gets a shot at the top and at some point someone else gets their turn.”
“You won this job because you were the best for the job. You are smart, quick to learn, and can quickly acquire any skill you might be lacking.”
“Remember, being valued and being rewarded are two different things.”
“Unfortunately, you won’t always get the ‘attaboy’ or ‘attagirl’ that you deserve; you need to put yourself in a position where you do not have to have it in order to stay motivated.”
“I believe in, ‘You don’t ask, you don’t get.'”
“Your success depends upon your ability to build successful relationships.”
“I demonstrated that I was listening—and everybody values being heard.”
“Believe, believe, and believe… in yourself! Henry Ford famously said, ‘If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.’ Belief in yourself carries more weight in how others see you than almost anything else. So shine on!”
“The 50/50 rule means that when people meet you for the first time, before you ever speak, there is a 50/50 chance that they think you are smart and a 50/50 chance that they’ll think you are stupid. These perceptions are, at least in part, created and destroyed by how you express yourself verbally, how you use your voice.”
“I bring all the Carlas to the table because I don’t know which Carla will be the one to connect and own the relationship.”
“Perception is the copilot to reality. How people see you will directly impact how they deal with you, so think about through which lenses people are looking at you.”
“Relationships are the most valuable currency you can have in any environment.”
“The key of building relationships is just as important as doing good work.”
“Trust is at the heart of any successful relationship, so you must be your authentic self in order to get people to trust you and want to build a relationship with you.”
“Build trust. This happens when you deliver results over and over again. Think of four things you can do for your client before you ask for anything.”
“Be authentic. There is no time or place to be complacent anymore.”
“It is a competitive disadvantage if you are not authentic. Your authenticity is at the heart of your power.”
“If you bring your authentic self to the table, people will trust you. Most people are not confident in their own skin. So if you are authentic and honest, people will gravitate toward you.”
“Doing a good job is not enough. You must also invest in relationships—with those above and below you.”
“I learned that when you can turn a presentation into a conversation, you have won the battle of converting a client; and second, I learned that the real Carla was my best competitive weapon and my key personal advantage.”
“I’m here to tell you that keeping your head down will not keep you from getting shot, so you might as well keep your head up so you can see the bullet coming. While everyone else is ducking, you have clear vision. Now is not the time to keep your head down. The issue with that is you submerge your voice and you become irrelevant and you put a big target on your front and back. Instead of ducking out of the way, stand up and offer strategies to cut costs or save time. You’ll be noticed for it.”
“Create clarity. People are motivated to outperform if they have a clear goal. Even if you cannot determine what the goal will be six months from now, set a clear one for each day.”
“When people know what they are playing for, they naturally want to outperform what they are playing for.”
“Leadership is a journey from execution to empowerment. A leader’s job is to create an environment where people want to contribute.”
“If you are an influential, impactful leader, you must be clear about what success looks like.”
“Be a good listener. Listening is more than the act of not speaking. Don’t just hear what someone is saying… listen. Active listening promotes trust and respect, helps to resolve problems, and promotes a better understanding of people. Listeners make the best leaders.”
“Leadership is not just about what you say, you must also listen to others and be prepared to step up to be helpful in innovative ways.”
“Amplify your impact as a leader by raising others up.”
“Risk taker—leaders must be comfortable taking risks.”
“You have to have a sense of taking risks. It takes courage to be a powerful influential, impactful leader.”
“The thing that makes a leader stand out is courage. This is what holds all these words together.”
“Do not give away your power.”
“I was choosing to walk in the front door of Morgan Stanley every day. I didn’t have to. I could make a different choice. I had to stop throwing away my power by focusing on what was wrong and focus on ways, to use a baseball term, ‘to knock the cover off the ball.'”
“I have been honored and humbled by all of my accomplishments.”
“Every experience you have will give you a blessing or a lesson.”
“Play big; never limit yourself.”
Related: The Wolf of Wall Street quotes.
