My inability to keep track of personal possessions.

I always dreamt of having a second stomach I could carry around in a bag, which I could attach to my real stomach when I sat down in restaurants. That way, I could eat a huge amount, never gaining weight.

Balancing my inner and outer life.

I’m not going to change anything about myself. I am happy and blessed with what God gave me, and I really have nothing to complain about.

And all the while I was growing up, of course, there were just constant conversations about money and money being tight and how are we going to make ends meet and sometimes not having enough money. And it really just made me committed to living a life with much more financial security.

I told our Ariel team, we are not going to limp out of COVID. We're going to slingshot out of COVID. We're going to be pulling that rubber band back and back, and we're going to be warehousing ideas, and getting work done, and so when this is over we will pole vault ahead.

So I started with this idea of could we do private equity totally differently than had been done? One of the major features of what we do is something called demand aggregation, where we go to corporations and what we call the CPO, the purchasing officers of those - chief purchasing officers. We developed a council of Fortune 500 companies.

We would constantly have to move because we couldn't quite afford the places that we were living. And sometimes we got evicted. And it was just very, very difficult as a child to try to understand that.

I could be strong and not tough. I could be kind without being soft. ... But in that moment, that olive branch of kindness was actually one that became a physical hug, and I think it taught me and the room a lot. And I said: You know what? I think this is an advantage.

I wrote about this in our first quarter client letter, actually, the concept of polycrisis, and I talked about the fact that my belief is that we've all become firefighters.