How a taxi bluff made Gary Cohn president of Goldman Sachs

Transcript

This guy bluffed a stranger in a taxi and ended up president of Goldman Sachs. Meet Gary Cohn. In 1982, Gary is fresh out of college, selling aluminum siding and dreaming of Wall Street. So one Friday, he takes the day off and goes to New York's commodities exchange to ask for a job. But he can't get past security and spends all day watching the traders through the glass. At closing time, a man runs out shouting that he's late for the airport. Gary asks to share his taxi. In the cab, the man admits he's just been put in charge of a new kind of trade called options. And he doesn't understand it. Gary tells him he knows everything about them. He knows nothing. But failing doesn't scare him. He's been failing his whole life. He's dyslexic. He went through four schools by sixth grade and was told he'd be lucky to drive a truck. The man tells him to call on Monday. That night, Gary buys the standard textbook. But 22 pages takes him six hours to read. So he picks four strategies and learns one a day from the diagrams. They get him the job. Eight years later, Goldman Sachs hires him. And in 2006, makes him president. He never tells the man he was bluffing and that textbook now hangs framed in his office.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.