The Will to Power

Great bio of former Googler and now Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. I got sucked in and read the whole thing. Lots of color on life at Google, Yahoo and in SV. Philosophy 160A at Stanford is intro to mathematical logic.

... Mayer credits her teachers for helping her become less shy.

They did this by showing Mayer that she could “organize” more than just her backpack, desk, and homework — that she could organize people, as their leader.

Mayer’s childhood piano teacher, Joanne Beckman, remembers Mayer being very different from other children in that she was someone who “watched people” in order to “figure out why they were doing what they were doing.”

“A lot of kids that age are very interested in themselves,” Beckman says, “She was looking at other people.”

By “looking” at her teachers, figuring out why they were doing what they were doing, Mayer overcame her “painful” shyness with peers by taking on the teacher’s role.

Even when she was in fifth grade, Mr. Flanagan could see the pedagogical side of Mayer developing. He thought she would become a teacher someday.

... In 1993, Mayer applied to, and was accepted into, 10 schools, including Harvard, Yale, Duke, and Northwestern.

To decide which one she would go to, Mayer created a spreadsheet, weighing variables for each.

She picked Stanford. Her plan was to become a brain doctor — a profession that doesn’t draw much on the leadership traits Mayer was quickly developing.

... That summer, Mayer attended the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia. It was nerd heaven. Picture science labs housed in wooden cabins shaded by trees. Mayer especially loved one experiment where they mixed water and corn starch to make a sloppy goo-like substance that seemed to defy gravity.

One day, a post-doctoral student from Yale named Zune Nguyen spoke to the campers as a guest lecturer. He stunned all the smart kids in the room with puzzles and brainteasers. For days, the campers couldn’t stop talking about his talk.

Finally, one of Mayer’s counselors had enough.

“You know, you have it all wrong,” the counselor said to Mayer and the campers. “It’s not what Zune knows, it’s how Zune thinks.”

The counselor said that what made Nguyen so amazing wasn’t the facts that he knew, but rather how he approached the world and how he thought about problems. The counselor said the most remarkable thing about Nguyen was that you could put him in an entirely new environment or present him with an entirely new problem, and within a matter of minutes he would be asking the right questions and making the right observations.

From that moment on, the phrase: “It’s not what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks,” stuck with Mayer as a sort of personal guiding proverb.

In the fall, Mayer went to Stanford and began taking pre-med classes. She planned to become a doctor. But by the end of her freshman year, she was sick of it.

“I was just doing too many flashcards,” she says. “They were easy for me, but it was just a lot of memorization.”

She says she wanted to find a major “that really made me think” — that would train her to “think critically, and become a great problem-solver.” She also wanted to “study how people think, how they reason, how they express themselves.”

“I had this nagging voice in my head saying ‘It’s not what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks.’”

... So that semester at Stanford was full of all-nighters for Mayer and her Philosophy 160A group.

Mayer ended up in a group that included Josh Elman, now a venture capitalist. Looking back on those study sessions, Elman remembers “times when people in the group were bouncing off the walls.”

He says, “Marissa was always like, ‘OK, back to work. Let’s get this done.’ She was focused on making sure we got the right answer quickly.”

“It felt like she was the smartest student in the room — and the most serious. You always knew those two things about her. Very smart. Very serious.”

The social dynamic of the group was typical for Mayer. As usual, she commanded the room — organized the group’s work in an all-business fashion — but was otherwise shy, and somewhat reclusive.

In the years ahead, this combination — Mayer’s willingness to be authoritative and demanding the way a teacher would, with a “painful” fear or reluctance of being personal — would cause problems for Mayer.

One Stanford classmate interpreted Mayer’s shyness as being “kind of stuck up.”

“She would do her work and then leave. When other people would stay and hang out and have pizza, she’d just be out of there because the work is done.”

Indeed, Mayer doesn’t seem to have had a very active social life in college.

One person who lived in her dorm said she appeared to always be “down to business” and “not much for socializing.”

“She wasn’t one of those people into making new friends around the dorm. She was always doing something more important than just chilling.”

The simplest explanation for Mayer’s social behavior at Stanford remains that Mayer was, as she has said many times, “painfully shy.” ...

Note the geeky laugh and the number of times she says "really smart people" ;-) @24min she talks about her personal strengths and decision strategies.