LESLEY STAHL: Maria Bartiromo, thank you so much for being with us on wowOwow.com.
MARIA BARTIROMO: Hi, Lesley, thanks for having me.
LESLEY: We’re thrilled. You are the first person to report live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Maria, while you were dubbed the “money honey,” you have won a reputation as a solid, top-flight financial reporter with as many — if not more — scoops and insights than any reporter, male or female. And now you’ve written a book called The 10 Laws of Enduring Success. You start the book with an anecdote about yourself on 9/11 when you were down there on Wall Street as the towers came down. And you went out into the street to report live right then, and you write that everything turned black around you, and that you were choking and running for your life, and it was your birthday. Wow.
| He said, “Run along! Get away from here little girl” … I just remained … You could imagine the knots in my stomach. |
MARIA: I know.
LESLEY: So tell us how you think that day and your experiences changed you.
MARIA: I think that day was harrowing for all of us, and it doesn’t matter if you were down there or not. But being down there at Ground Zero and actually watching the people’s reactions, and watching the camaraderie on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, how everyone was just feeling so strange and just … we united and we had fear. You know, it taught me a lot, actually, and it did change me, because I think you recognize your own mortality, and you recognize that anything can happen at any time, to snuff out all that you’re doing. And I think the reason that I started the book with that story was because over this 20-year period that I’ve been covering financial news and the economy, I’ve seen a lot of booms and busts and different sentiments about Wall Street and about business from the masses. And after September 11, I think that it became clear that there are times that you could do everything right in life and you could become so successful that it actually puts you at the top of the tower, in what would be a terrific location. And yet you can turn around and everything can get snuffed away from you. And, of course, that was terrorism and that was a very rare event, but it is emblematic of what I’m trying to say. And I began the book with that story, and then went into a number of other boom-and-bust-type situations, when a person feels like the world is falling apart around them and they have to figure out how to adapt, and they have to figure out how to survive, and then thrive. And that’s what I did. I went back to a number of the interviews that I have done, whether it was heads of state, or big CEOs, or big investors, and I asked them, “How did you become successful? How did you get there, and how did you keep it? How do you keep it?”
