Leadership Notes #54

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Interview: Polina Marinova Pompliano

Polina Marinova Pompliano is the founder of The Profile, a new media company that features long-form profiles of successful people and companies each week. Previously, she spent five years at Fortune where she wrote more than 1,300 articles and earned the trust of prominent investors and entrepreneurs. As the author and editor of Term Sheet, Fortune’s industry-leading dealmaking newsletter, Polina interviewed the industry’s most influential dealmakers, including Melinda Gates, Steve Case, Chamath Palihapitiya, Alexis Ohanian, and more. Polina is the author of Hidden Genius.

Below is a partial transcript of Polina’s interview for the Center for Global Leadership seminar series.

Potolicchio: Polina, can you talk about what “Hidden Genius” is? Why did you decide to write this book?

Pompliano: I was born in Bulgaria and went to first and second grade there. My parents won the Green Card Lottery in 1999 and in 2000, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in The US. That was an experience in and of itself. My parents were chemical engineers and I thought I would study science because of that, but I was really, really bad at everything science-related, I just liked writing, but I never thought of writing as a career, until in high school. There was a journalism club that I joined and it allowed me to talk to people, do research, and write, which were my three favorite things. I went down that path, I went to the University of Georgia in the US, I became the editor-in-chief of the college paper, worked at USA Today and CNN, and then, I made my way to Fortune Magazine, in New York, where I did more business writing. I had been at Fortune for five years, writing about venture capital, startups, funding, and fun things like that, but in my spare time, I was a little bit bored. So I asked myself: “what do I really enjoy doing?” Shockingly, it wasn't writing about venture capital. I liked long form profiles, it is so random and so specific, but I just liked reading about interesting people, getting to know what differentiates them from everybody else, because, realistically, any two people who live in the same area, who kind of had a similar upbringing, you are tempted to say: “Okay, it's very, very hard as a writer to pull out somebody's essence in what makes them, them”. I was drawn to that, I would read these long articles about people in my spare time. So I was like, “Why don't you start something called “The Profile”, which was a weekly email at the time, there wasn't even a newsletter that I would send to family and friends. I would pick seven to eight articles I read that week, and we talked about them. That thing that I did in my spare time evolved into a newsletter that now has over 100,000 people who read it, and it is amazing because I get to do what I love, which is: read and write and get paid for it. 

While I started doing this on the side, I was still at Fortune Magazine, then came a point in 2020, where I was like: “What if I quit my job and focus on this newsletter full time? What would that look like?” Once I started thinking about it, I couldn't get it out of my head and it seemed like everything I read or listened to, every podcast was like “the passion economy is on the rise”, “the independent creator”, “the whatever curator” and I was like “oh my God, all the signs are pointing to me leaving my job at Fortune to do a newsletter full time”.

At the time, no other legacy media reporter had quit their normal job to do a newsletter, so I had nobody to look to, I had no idea. I quit Fortune and started writing this full time and the pandemic hit, I took a massive risk in a time of massive uncertainty, now what? When 100% of your time, focus and energy is on one thing, there's like a fire under you, where you make it work, you have to pay your rent, so it works. There were things here and there, but it ultimately worked. I had been writing this newsletter for five years in 2021 when I was like: “How can I synthesize all that I have learned into one thing that I can give to people?” And that was a book, that was how “Hidden Genius” came about.

“Hidden Genius” is how I define the differentiator that I mentioned earlier, that makes somebody uniquely themselves. It could be a mental framework, some sort of piece of wisdom, it could be a skill that they have that other people just don't have at that same level. Don't think that is their X Factor. I took everything that I had read and learned and all the people I had interviewed in my life and put it into this book, called “Hidden Genius” that you can now read.

Potolicchio: Can you give us some tips about how you were able to make that adjustment?

Pompliano: There's a huge power in being from another country, and in either moving or spending some time in a different country. When I moved, I was eight, I didn't speak any English. When I went to school in the South, the accent was totally different from what I was learning in schools, like British English versus Southern. Because I didn't speak the language, I couldn't read or write yet, in English, and it forced me to observe a lot. I started observing these social dynamics, Why are people sitting here in the cafeteria? What is the teacher trying to say? Why is this student whatever? and I got really good at social skills because I was forced to observe for such a long time, without being able to communicate. A lot of times, people underestimate immigrants, or people from other countries, “Oh, you speak with an accent, you must be inferior in some way.” That's actually probably your greatest superpower if you harness it right, because being underestimated is the best thing that can happen to you. When I was at Fortune Magazine, it broke “The Enron Story”, the biggest fraud in history. People have a picture in their head of who is about to interview them, somebody in a suit and tie. I walk in the room and they're like “Oh, I did not realize that they sent the intern, she is so young, she's whatever.” That has always worked in my favor, because I had done my research and I had done the work to be in that room. When I was interviewing them, they would over-explain to me, and in that over-explaining, a lot of times I got a scoop on a story or they said something they wouldn't normally say to someone who's super intimidating. Being from another country, not only do you have the perspective that a lot of Americans who haven't traveled don't have, but you're also able to hold different conflicting ideas in your head. I always say I was born in Bulgaria, I grew up in the South, and I moved to New York City, I now live here. I can see a lot of different things, in a prism that people who only grew up in the South cannot see, or people who only grew up in New York City and have lived here for a long time can't see; I understand why certain people voted for a certain president, those are things that I can understand because I have different perspectives. And like many, I don't see the world as black and white.

Potolicchio: This might be a question that you can't answer. It's almost like asking—- now that I have two kids, I feel this—- “who is your favorite child?”, but what is your favorite profile, or a favorite section of your book, now that you are an author? What would you like us to take away or who is the individual that you think we should study?

Pompliano: There is someone I really enjoyed interviewing, his name is Francis Ngannou, a former MMA champion, born in Cameroon. He had this crazy story of how he got to the US. As a kid, he grew up in poverty and would always say “ I'm going to be a professional athlete one day” and his friends made fun of him. He said something fascinating: “to know who you want to be, you have to first know who you do not.” As he grew up, his dad was a violent guy, who abused his mom, a street fighter, and he said: “I knew that I did not want to be my dad.” That was powerful in identifying what he did want to be. Then, his second thing was identifying what you do want to be, I want to be a professional athlete. At age 9-15, you can start acting as your aspirational self. He did not wait to be a professional athlete to stop drinking and smoking, he just never started. In Cameroon, people love drinking beer. When he was a teenager hanging out, everybody was drinking beer, he did not, because in his head, he was already a professional athlete, so kind of living as your aspirational self. The third thing that I learned from him, which is important, is that there will come a point in your life, where you have to bet on yourself in some way. For him, he had to bet on himself that he could make it as an MMA fighter. Once he had that title, “Heavyweight Champion of The World”, he said, you can get really tied to that title. But his mindset was: “I'm not the only one to have it, there have been people before me, and there will be people after me with that title. What people cannot take away from me is my skill. I can fail, you can send me back to where I came from, I know that I have the skills to fail over and over and over again, because I can get up over and over and over again. You can take away my money, my status, my titles, but you cannot take away my skills.” I think that's a really big misconception, people are really afraid to fail, because they always think “If I fail, I'm starting from zero, from scratch.” The truth is, if you fail faster than your peers, you actually have more experience. You've learned what doesn't work faster than everybody else, so now you can iterate. The point is failures are a step, a staircase to the next thing.

Potolicchio: One of my favorite places to read when I read an author is the acknowledgments section. I really liked the notes that you wrote to your parents, to your kids, and then to your husband as well, particularly to your husband about confidence and betting on yourself. I have impostor syndrome. I don't think I belong at the table at this conference later this week. Can you help me out? Who can I study? Or what tip do you have to help me overcome this impostor syndrome that I'm feeling?

Pompliano: I was reading this book that Oprah wrote (“What I know for sure”). Oprah has interviewed every single person under the sun. She admitted that whether it was Beyonce, or Barack Obama, or like anybody she has ever interviewed, when the interview would come to an end and the cameras would turn off, they would all ask the same question: “Was that okay?” Oh my God, you're Beyonce, why are you seeking validation for? But impostor syndrome, it's something that I have, weirdly, never really experienced because, it's like the Francis thing, you have the skill. If you're in that room, you should be in that room. I like to think of Sara Blakely, who founded Spanx. She often says that, when she was little, her dad would go around the table and make her and her brother share what they failed at that day. If they hadn't failed at something, he would be genuinely disappointed, because it means that they didn't take a risk that day. We kind of reframe that for her. It's similar to imposter syndrome, if you don't take the risk, you'll never end up being in that room. The fact that you're in that room means you took the risk, and it paid off. I don't think anything is random. 

Potolicchio: One of the things I learned from you, Polina, is that I always ask “do you give yourself better advice or do you give your friends better advice?” Everybody tends to say they give their friends better advice. I remember reading a profile that you wrote and Beyonce is not Beyonce, when she's on stage, she's Sasha Fierce. Or when you talk about Kobe Bryant, he was not Kobe Bryant, the basketball player, he was the Black Mamba, almost coming up with this other personality. It was one of those tips that you gave out on a weekly basis that has just stuck with me.

Polina, my last question I steal from Ban Ki-moon, the former Secretary General of the United Nations. He used to ask people who he was interviewing for a position to work for him: “What is the question that you prepared for this interview that I didn't ask you? And what is the answer to that question?” I have a little bit of an iteration, Polina, which is: what's the question we should ask you about “Hidden Genius”, your book, that no one asks you? And what's the answer to that question?

Pompliano: It's really interesting. I actually realized that I didn't include this in the book. In the book, I say that the question that I asked myself that changed the trajectory of my life was “how do I define success?” Few, very few people ask. I did not answer it in the book, I answered it through people. For me, success, up until three years ago, used to be the standard definition: status, money, wealth, material possessions. Now, it's very much I find people fascinating, like the interview that I published today with Laura Decker, she is the youngest person to sail solo around the world. It's insane. The undertaking, she started when she was 14, she ended when she was 16. It's people like that. I like seeing people who take risks, people whose life isn't linear. The winding path is really what I think success is and also it's a life well lived. The type of story that I like, is somebody who succeeded at something, failed miserably and fallen flat on their face, learnt from that experience, and went on to achieve whatever other thing they wanted to do again, and then came out on the other side with lessons to share, for people who are undertaking a similar journey. Those are the types of people that I included in the book.

When I was at Fortune, I interviewed many successful people, like Melinda Gates, and all these people were like “Wow, she's the most successful philanthropic woman in the world.” I don't idolize them because I think idolizing people is just worshiping perfect versions of really imperfect people. When Melinda and Bill Gates went on their tour, doing interviews together, people were viewing them as relationship goals. In my head, I thought that was really dangerous, because nobody knows what's going on behind closed doors and as we came to find out, things weren't so perfect and they ended up divorcing. If you worship people, if you idolize them, they will always kind of disappoint you. 

I like a messy life, because I know that things aren't perfect and to me, that is success. 

Potolicchio: What is a book that we should pair with “Hidden Genius”? Think about a book that we should read either before, or after, or at the same time. Is there a book that belongs on the shelf right next to it? I mean, of course, your second book, which I know you are going to start writing tomorrow, but is there another book that you think we should have? 

Pompliano: I actually reread this book, it's Oprah's, the one that I mentioned before, it's called “What I know for sure”. It's honestly just little tidbits of her life, where she has learned lessons from all the people she has interviewed. There is so much value in interviewing people, observing them, even if you've never met them, because you get to hear how they think, how they reason, and you extract what you want to learn. It's the learnings you should extract, not the flashy, like “I am Kim Kardashian, everything's perfect.” It's the gritty, what makes you, you and where you have failed?