Kevin Warsh is President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, replacing Jerome Powell when his term expires May 15. While he still faces a complicated Senate confirmation before securing the job, Warsh’s early lessons in leadership came from an unlikely first job: a horse track.

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

“I learned a lot about hard work,” the 55-year-old recalled to the How Leaders Lead podcast. “I learned a lot about trying to keep track of your pencils because there was good margin in pencils; we billed them as lucky Saratoga pencils that would go with the program… And at the end of the day, if the number six horse won, that would be the guy who’d come back and give you a tip.”

Warsh would later go on to study public policy at Stanford and law at Harvard before climbing the ranks of Morgan Stanley. Along the way, he said, he learned that how hard you work matters far more than anything else in the workplace.

“Merit really carried the day,” Warsh said. “As you show up in your job—in government or in the private sector—with skills, with knowledge, with insight, and also huge amounts of humility, age and rank seem to matter a lot less in almost every place where I’ve been.” 

“Title was the least important thing,” he added. “Ability to contribute to the team, to execute, were much 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 figures in finance, government, and business (after all, his father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, a billionaire businessman and heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune). And when it comes to leadership, he doesn’t credit management books or business school—he credits that proximity.

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

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

“I guess there are people that are probably born great leaders,” he said. “But for most of us, we end up being around really good leaders and really bad leaders. And it’s incumbent upon us to try to pick up those good skills and to avoid the bad skills.”

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

“I’ve never been one who thinks that you can go into the Barnes & Noble section of the bookstore on leadership and read a few books and have it figured out,” Warsh added. “That’s just not my experience, either from my own experience, or from the people that I’ve been around. They have learned from the best and frankly, learned from the worst.”

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

It’s not just Warsh who argues leadership is best learned through lived experience; It’s a view echoed by both the current and former heads of the Federal Reserve.

“In a world that will continue to evolve quickly and in unexpected ways, you will need to be agile,” Powell told graduates of Georgetown University Law Center in 2024.  

“Embracing change and taking risks can be an important part of your development as a professional and as a person,” Powell added. “Your formal education may end today, but you are not done learning. Many of the important things you will need to know can only be learned through experience. And experience can be a hard but irreplaceable teacher.”

Powell’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, shared her own version of that lesson—emphasizing that growth often comes from discomfort. 

“You often have to do things that are scary at some level,” she told The Washington Post. “You just have to force yourself to face up to it and do it. You have to pull up your socks and do what you were hired to do.”