Quotes from Mellody Hobson

I honestly think I'm going to rot my brain with all the news. I'm a news junkie.

I take vitamins when I wake up. One of them I need to take is to wake up my brain. It has some caffeine in it, and it stimulates my brain and I'm literally not a person without it.

Every game is won with patience.

The first thing I do after waking up is check my phone for news. I like to make sure the world is still here and understand what happened overnight.

As citizens, I'm asking you not to leave any child behind. I'm asking you not to be color blind, but to be color brave, so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible.

I know that my life is a miracle and because of that, I can't think my success is because I was so great at this, that or the other. A lot of things happened and came together. A lot of people went out of their way for me.

The role of a board of directors is to be a sounding board for the vision of the company - to hold executives accountable in executing that vision and to ensure a management succession plan is in place.

People can be sensitive, so if I need to, I'll suck it up and be more flowery. I'll do what it takes to get the outcome I want. As I like to say, sometimes you have to crouch to conquer.

Diverse perspectives lead to a better outcome. There's so much data, when you look at the math, in terms of the investor returns and the shareholder value that gets created from more diverse boards.

We've got one shot at this life, and to not be productive with what we've been given, to me, is a travesty. I think the biggest waste is when a human life is wasted. It's unforgivable.

We cannot afford to be color-blind, we have to be color-brave.

I've told stories about people coming to my office and giving me their coats and requesting that I hang them up and get coffee - which I dutifully do. And then I come in and sit at the head of the table. It's awkward.

When I think of my career and why I leaned in, it comes down to basic survival.

My mother always wanted me to be in the best environment that I could be in. She wanted me to go to the best schools. Every now and again she'd save up enough for us to get a nice apartment in downtown Chicago, but we were never able to sustain it.

In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach.

I love Obama. And Michelle. I was so grateful for them. They were such stunning people. We were lucky to have them. They were great symbols for our society.

Invite people into your life who don't look or act like you. You might find they challenge your assumptions and make you grow.

I've used some of my differences as a way to stand out and to hopefully count and matter - and hopefully create an opportunity for others.

If we can learn to deal with our discomfort and just relax into it we'll have a better life.

It took me a long time to be as brave in my personal life as I was in my professional life to be brave in love means opening yourself up to the possibility of heartbreak.

Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie.

We don't prognosticate macroeconomic factors, we're looking at our companies from a bottom-up perspective on their long-run prospects of returning.

I was desperate to understand money. Not to make it, to understand it. I wanted to know how it worked, and I wanted to know so that I would have enough and would be able to make good financial decisions. That led me to Ariel.

People feel a great deal of their wealth or lack thereof in their home value. Despite the fact they're living there and not going to sell it per se, it does have a big psychological effect.