REID HOFFMAN: I want to acknowledge that most companies don’t have the option of hiring rocket scientists, Olympic athletes and Super Bowl winners. But Eric does have more pragmatic advice for companies that can’t set the bar at Himalayan heights.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So today I would suggest that—and this has since been confirmed by many studies—that persistence is the single biggest predictor of future success. And so we would look for persistence. And the second thing was curiosity. What do you care about? The combination of persistence and curiosity is a very good predictor of employee success in a knowledge economy.