Heather Bresch, chief executive officer of Mylan NV, holds up Mylan EpiPen medication while speaking during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Lawmakers are questioning Bresch about how the company raised the price of the life-saving injection to $600 for a two-pack, from $57 a shot when it took over sales of the product in 2007.

Born when Pakistan was founded, Romesh Wadhwani moved to India as an infant. He was two-years-old when he contracted Polio, and still has trouble walking even today. Still he got himself accepted to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. He left for Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh in 1969 to get a master’s in electrical engineering, and then his Ph.D.

As a manager interviewing job candidates, it’s tempting to hire the person who has done almost exactly the same thing you need to have done. It’s comforting to hire that person, because you know that they have already performed a job just like your job opening before. I don’t want you to hire the person who has done the exact same job before — particularly if that person  has done the job numerous times! This person is stuck in place.

Photo: Ethan Pines, wsj.com, Forbes, Shutterstock. Design: Nick DeSantis, Forbes Staff Elizabeth Holmes—and her company, Theranos—promised to change the way people got blood tests, replacing needles with finger pricks. In June, FORBES’ estimate of her net worth fell from $4.5 billion to $0. On October 5, Theranos got out of the business of drawing blood entirely. What happened?   Photo: Fortune.

Dear Liz, I work in an educational publishing company and like a lot of other people, I am frustrated at the slow pace of change in companies like mine. Your leadership ideas would hit my managers like news from outer space. They don’t tell us “Great job!” and congratulate employees on a job well done. It’s all about the metrics at my job, all day and every day.

The real world is going to serve up tremendous leaders and teachers who can guide you at certain points along your path, and poor leaders at other points. Sometimes we think that the only thing we can learn from a lousy manager is the lesson “Now I know what not to do when I’m a leader!” but there are lots of other powerful lessons to learn from poor managers, as well. They are not necessarily fun lessons to learn, but they are valuable anyway.

shutterstock In our youth-obsessed society, we often find the media spotlight aimed at certain tech industry whiz kids who have catapulted from virtual obscurity to become overnight billionaires. You know the names: people like Garrett Camp (Uber), Jack Dorsey (Twitter and Square), Jan Koum (WhatsApp), Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), whose net worth Forbes just estimated at over $55 billion. I tip my hat to them all.

Fear… It can be paralyzing. It may be what is keeping you stuck in that job or relationship that you hate. Neuroscience tells us that when the fear system of the brain is active, we are less likely to take risks, and more likely to cling onto what we already have. Moreover, fear requires massive energy—so much, in fact, that it impairs your ability to focus on other tasks at hand.

Shutterstock Perspective is a powerful thing. The first time I learned the real power of perspective was when I read Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in college. In it, he cites one example where he was on a subway and sitting across from him was a gentleman with his head bowed while his three kids were acting like, well, kids.

Some people are born to lead. You can see it at an early age: the charismatic girl at summer camp who everybody follows off the end of the dock, or the boy in Grade 8 who always gets picked first for the sports team. Many entrepreneurs have that gene, too: it’s what makes us able to sell an idea to investors, a job to employees and, ultimately, a product to consumers.