The Little Things That Lead to Big Things

(Reading up before an interview with Howard Buffett, Tony Blair in 2013)

Years ago, when I first began as a cub reporter at Dow Jones Newswires, an editor gave me a valuable piece of advice.

He knew I'd just graduated with basically zero knowledge of business. I had just spent the last four years holed up as an English major at Penn, where a portfolio was something I put my papers in, not managed. Needless to say, I had a sharp learning curve as both a journalist and a business news journalist.

On the day he was about to send me to a press conference, he said there was one thing that would help me immensely as a freshman reporter. He told me to never leave for an interview without being "read up." How many times, he said, had he himself gone out to interviews without reading up well on his subjects. Each time that happened, the interview was only half as good as it could be.

"You never know what can happen when you miss that one little piece of info," he said in his mild-mannered British accent. "It could trigger a follow-up that breaks the news or gives you an exclusive detail nobody else could get."

That one little piece of advice has stayed with me through my years as a reporter, and then an anchor. I've lost count how many times a little detail in an article I read led to a piece of news or gets the interviewee to open up in a new direction. Being "read up" is one of the biggest determinants between an average interview and a great interview. That and listening. Why? It sounds simple but it's easier said than done: to do great things, you have do the little things first.

And I'm not just talking about acing a television interview. This applies to almost everything else in life, from that first job interview to starting a business to investing for retirement. People see Warren Buffett as the light-hearted investing genius who rose to fame as one of the world's wealthiest; they forget that he's logged tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of hours, sitting in his Omaha office reading annual reports, financial data and articles on every single one of the companies he's bought. To get big, you start small.

As one CEO said to me recently when discussing the glamour of the Silicon Valley world, people forget that when you actually build a business, you're the "CEO, accountant, IT person and toilet cleaner." If you can't get over that, he said, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur in the first place.

By now, "reading up" is second nature to me - I can't go into any meeting, interview, lunch, event without reading up on the people I'm about to encounter. Try to make that a habit of yours too and if it seems too much to do, remember this: do the little things first.

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Betty Liu is the Anchor/Editor-at-Large at Bloomberg Television and author of Work Smarts: What CEOs Say You Need to Know to Get Ahead. You can buy it at Amazon.com or get signed copies at www.betty-liu.com/books.