Kevin Warsh is President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, instead Jerome Powell when his term expires on May 15. While he is still facing a complex Confirmed by the Senate before getting the job, Warsh’s first lessons in leadership came from an unlikely first job: a horse track.

At age 14, Warsh worked setting up kegs and hauling ice at the Saratoga, New York, racetrack before getting a promotion selling programs and pencils to bettors streaming through the gates.

“I learned a lot about hard work,” the 55-year-old recalled How Leaders Lead podcast. “I’ve learned a lot about trying to track your pencils because there’s a good margin in the pencils; we bill them as lucky Saratoga pencils to go with the program… And at the end of the day, if the number six horse wins, that’s the guy who comes back and gives you a tip.

Warsh later went on to study public policy at Stanford and law at Harvard before rising through the ranks Morgan Stanley. Along the way, he said, he learned that how hard you work is more important than anything else in the workplace.

“Merit really carries the day,” Warsh said. “As long as you show up at your job—in the government or the private sector—with skills, with knowledge, with insight, and also a great deal of humility, age and rank seem to matter less almost everywhere I’ve been.”

“The title is the least important thing,” he added. “The ability to contribute to the team, to execute, is more appropriate.”

Kevin Walsh’s advice for Gen Z: Skip the leadership books—study real leaders instead

Kevin Warsh’s career has put him in rooms with some of the most powerful people in finance, government, and business (after all, his father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, a billionaire businessman and heir to Estee Lauder cosmetic luck). And when it comes to leadership, he doesn’t credit management books or business school—he credits that proximity.

“The key to becoming a better leader is to find better leaders and learn from them,” Warsh said. “We only know who we are, we only reveal ourselves by interacting with other people.”

It’s a lesson that doesn’t come naturally for Warsh. He describes himself as a long-time introvert and therefore, early in his career, he had to push himself outside his comfort zone to interact more directly with those he could learn from.

“I think there are people who are probably born great leaders,” he said. “But for most of us, we are around very good leaders and bad leaders.

That’s why Warsh is skeptical of the idea that leadership is possible mastered from a bookstore shelf.

“I’ve never been one to think that you can go to the Barnes & Noble section of the bookstore about leadership and read a few books and figure it out,” Warsh added. “That’s not just my experience, either from my own experience, or from people I know. They learn from the best and frankly, learn from the worst.”

Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen: Experience is a ‘difficult but irreplaceable teacher’

Warsh is not alone in arguing that leadership is best learned through lived experience; It’s a view echoed by current and former heads of the Federal Reserve.

“In a world that continues to evolve quickly and in unexpected ways, you have to be agile,” Powell SPOKE graduates of Georgetown University Law Center in 2024.

“Embracing change and taking risks can be an important part of your growth as a professional and as a person,” Powell added. “Your formal education may be over now, but you’re not done learning. Many of the important things you need to know can only be learned through experience. And experience can be a difficult but irreplaceable teacher.”

Powell’s successor, Janet Yellenshares his own version of that lesson—emphasizing that growth often comes from discomfort.

“You always have to do things that are scary on some level,” he said The Washington Post. “You have to force yourself to face it and do it. You have to pull your socks up and do what you were hired to do.”