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Ruth Gotian, Ed.D., M.S.

Chief Learning Officer at Weill Cornell Medicine

New Rochelle, United States

“Prolific mentor and educator, leading important research into the secrets of success.” -Thinkers50.

Do you ever wonder why some people achieve exceptional success while others reach average levels?

Based on decades of research, I study the most successful people of our generation, including Nobel laureates, astronauts, and Olympic champions, in order to understand what they do when the world isn't watching. What did they do that ultimately put them in an elite class? How did they overcome failures?

I uncover the habits and practices of high achievers and teach them to others through my keynotes, coaching, and workshops. Known as a "mentor's mentor", I take pride in my ability to coach others to identify and then meet their overt and covert goals.

In addition to working with individuals, I help organizations achieve success by conceiving, designing, and launching innovative programs and redesigning and fixing underperforming ones.

I am fortunate to be recognized by the journal Nature and Columbia University as a leadership expert with a focus on professional ascension. I was recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the world's top management thinkers in 2021. My invited global lectures, published articles in such journals as Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Nature, Academic Medicine, Psychology Today, and Scientific American, national awards, and educational activities all underscore my ability to aid professionals strengthen their career development acumen. I draw great strength from helping others succeed, find, and develop their passion.

My academic background includes a bachelor's and a master's degree in business management and a doctorate in organizational/adult learning and leadership.

Ruth Gotian, Ed.D., M.S. Points
Academic 0
Author 230
Influencer 70
Speaker 0
Entrepreneur 0
Total 300

Points based upon Thinkers360 patent-pending algorithm.

Thought Leader Profile

Portfolio Mix

Company Information

Company Type: Company
Minimum Project Size: Undisclosed
Average Hourly Rate: Undisclosed
Number of Employees: Undisclosed
Company Founded Date: Undisclosed

Areas of Expertise

Business Strategy 30.10
HR
Innovation 36.69
Leadership 33.55
Management 39.94
Social 30.22

Industry Experience

Publications

18 Article/Blogs
The Curse of Competence
Psychology Today
September 17, 2025
Why does being so good at so many things sometimes hold us back?

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

How Dependability Can Make Us Invisible
Psychology Today
August 10, 2025
When you do your job perfectly, no one notices. Projects run smoothly, crises vanish, problems resolve before anyone becomes aware.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

The Hidden Cost of Being Dependable
Psychology Today
July 07, 2025
If you’re the one person people always turn to, the one who “gets things done,” congratulations! You’re dependable—but not necessarily promotable

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

4 Steps to Successfully Navigate Power Dynamics at Work
Psychology Today
June 02, 2025
Many in our workforce struggle to successfully navigate these dynamics. This leads to misunderstandings, strained relationships, or missed opportunities. But all hope is not lost.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

My weekend with Marshall Goldsmith: Here is what I learned
Linkedin
May 16, 2025
“Can you come to Atlanta?” That was the email I received one day from Marshall Goldsmith, the #1 globally ranked leadership coach and author of the new bestselling book, The Earned Life. Unfortunately, the date was far from convenient as I had just been traveling extensively and was in need to wind down, catching up on missed sleep, hundreds of emails in my inbox, and multiple manuscripts I was writing or editing. But one thing I learned early on is when Marshall Goldsmith tells you to come, you make it your business to get there. You never know what to expect, but you can bet the experience will forever change you.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Networking for Introverts
Psychology Today
May 12, 2025
You’ve heard it before: “It’s not what you know—it’s who you know.” But what if just the idea of going out to meet more people feels draining, and you know it will likely end in an "introvert hangover"—that post-event crash from overstimulation? But you know you need to do it. LinkedIn just announced that 90% of hiring managers say referrals are critical for job placement.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Why We Quickly Forget So Much of What We Learn
Psychology Today
April 24, 2025
You finish a fascinating podcast, read an insightful article, or attend a powerful training session. You’re intrigued and nod along in agreement. It clicks. You’re energized. You even think, “I’m going to remember this forever.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Olympic Champion Aaron Grandidier-Nkanang’s Journey In Rugby 7s
Forbes
March 24, 2025
At just 24, Aaron Grandidier-Nkanang can call himself an Olympic champion. A gold medalist for France in Rugby 7s, his journey from London to competing in the biggest international arena, is a story of bold decisions, cultural shifts, and overcoming obstacles.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Worried About Losing Employees? Mentorship And Training Can Help
Forbes
February 12, 2025
Employees are taking the reins of their own professional development. Find out how lifelong learning is reshaping the workplace in 2025.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Top 30 Thinkers Redefining Leadership In 2025
Forbes
January 27, 2025
Discover the 2025 Thinkers50 Radar Class: 30 visionary leaders transforming leadership, innovation, and business impact in today’s fast-changing world

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

92 Percent of People Never Achieve Their Goals
Psychology Today
January 01, 2025
A staggering 92 percent of people never achieve their goals. That means only 8 percent turn their dreams into reality. Why the disconnect? It’s not for lack of ambition—it’s a much simpler and easily fixable explanation—lack of actionable, realistic plans.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

No Promotion? How To Prevent Yourself From Becoming Expendable
LinkedIn
July 13, 2021
What is it about some people who always appear to jump to the front of the promotion line? They always seem to know when the next opportunity is coming and they are first in line. What and whom do they know that helps them get promoted? More importantly, what can you do to become more promotable? According to Amii Barnard-Bahn, a former Fortune Global 50 executive, the answer can be distilled down to a few points underscored by traits of emotional intelligence, leadership, and executive presence. It is essential to note, these are learned elements, which means you can work to make yourself the person every leader would want to promote.

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Tags: Social, Management, Leadership

6 Reasons Why Some People Dream And Others Achieve
Forbes
May 11, 2021
As I previously reported for Forbes, high achievers can produce up to 400 percent more than the average employee. They impact productivity, innovation, and motivation and have the ability to completely alter the company’s culture. Being part of this elite group lets you be at the forefront of change and surrounds you with all of the movers and shakers who are on a similar mission; people who are curious, innovative and have a strong work ethic. As a high achiever, you are more likely to be engulfed around people who want to find solutions to problems, not whine about what did not go their way.

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Tags: Social, Leadership

How To Reclaim Your Time At Work
Forbes
February 09, 2021
We are a month into the new year. How are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions? Most people set goals for themselves. Some even come up with a plan to bring it to fruition. Most people drop the ball because they are adding a goal without removing any of their other obligations. They are simply changing the denominator by adding more things to achieve. Sadly, that is not sustainable.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

Is That The Best Solution? ‘Think Again’ Says Adam Grant
Forbes
February 02, 2021
Several years into my career, a senior faculty member and I had a conversation that led me to one of those ‘a-ha’ moments. “Just because something is written in a textbook, it is not necessarily true. It is only the author’s version of the truth,” she told me. I was stunned. That one statement contradicted everything I learned throughout my educational and professional career. I let that statement marinate in my head for a while. Before long, I realized that my colleague was correct. I began rethinking everything I learned and reexamined the basis for that truth. In his latest book, Think Again, organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Dr. Adam Grant looks into this very issue. He suggests that success rests in the power of knowing what we don’t know and being released from our tunnel vision.

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Tags: Management, Leadership, Education

How To Find The Perfect Mentor To Boost Your Career
Forbes
January 26, 2021
Early in her career, Dr. Svetlana Yedreshteyn, now the head of learning and development at a financial firm, realized she missed out on many opportunities to be mentored. She was looking for the perfect mentor but hesitated to reach out to anyone. She did not know if they would be interested or willing to mentor her, did not know how to wisely use any of the precious time they would give her, and was not convinced it would be beneficial as their work differed from her own. She was looking for "the right mentor" and did not find it.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

Role Model, Mentor, Coach, or Sponsor—Which Do You Need?
Psychology Today
January 24, 2021
Are you including the right person to help you with your career?

Role model, mentor, coach, and sponsor. What is the difference? Which do you need? Is it one person or four? Which will help you excel and blaze forward? Each is a distinctive role that can help push your career and self-confidence in different ways. Knowing the difference will help you round out your mentoring team, the group of people who serve as your personal advisory board.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

How To Eliminate Bureaucracy In Your Organization
Forbes
January 19, 2021
“We’ve always done it that way” is my least favorite sentence in the English language. It crushes dreams, innovation, and possibilities. Whenever someone tells me that, I always respond with, “Remember Blockbuster?” They did not just fail to evolve; they neglected to ask their customers what they wanted.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

14 Author Newsletters
Why You Forget What You Just Learned—and What to Do About It
Linkedin
September 14, 2025
You walk out of a brilliant workshop, notebook full, brain buzzing. You're inspired. Motivated. Ready to implement everything you just heard. But by the time you get home, you're struggling to remember the third point from that killer slide deck—and by next week, the workshop feels like a distant memory. Sound familiar?

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Borrow, Don’t Build: The Secret to Faster, Smarter Innovation
Linkedin
September 03, 2025
Your team is stuck on a complex operational challenge. You've consulted industry best practices, benchmarked against competitors, and analyzed case studies from similar companies. The solutions feel incremental, predictable, and insufficient.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

The Real Reason You’re Drowning in 'Urgent' Requests—And How to Fix It
Linkedin
August 31, 2025
I once had a role which I loved, but there were days (often weeks and months) where I felt like a firefighter, putting out one blaze after another - some real, some perceived.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Why Great Leaders Stop Talking About Their Wins
Linkedin
August 17, 2025
You're sharing your latest victory in a team meeting. The deal that made headlines. The impossible deadline you crushed. The industry award sitting on your shelf. You're inspiring others with what's possible, right?

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Think in Systems, Not Silos: A Strategy the Top 1% Use Daily
Linkedin
July 20, 2025
You've likely heard the stories: Bill Gates reads three hours daily. Warren Buffett spends 80% of his workday reading. Mark Cuban devotes three hours to reading every morning. These habits have created a perception that extraordinary success requires extraordinary reading habits—but this misses the deeper pattern that actually drives innovation.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Forget the Trophy—What Really Drives Success
Linkedin
July 06, 2025
Ever notice how some people seem to have boundless energy for their work while others burn out despite having impressive credentials? The difference often isn't talent, intelligence, or even opportunity—it's that intangible "fire in the belly" that keeps certain individuals pushing forward long after others have thrown in the towel.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

The Hidden Danger of Reaching the Top
Linkedin
June 22, 2025
I often get asked about a common thread I found among the highest achievers I’ve studied—Nobel laureates, astronauts, Olympic and NBA champions. My answer? They all surround themselves with people who believe in them more than they believe in themselves. They have a mentor and a coach–an entire support team.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

The Neglected High Achievers: Why Organizations Are Losing Their Best Talent
Linkedin
June 08, 2025
In today's "Great Reevaluation," top performers are reassessing their commitments faster than organizations can respond. While companies scramble to offer higher salaries and better perks, they're missing something fundamental: high achievers aren't just leaving for money—they're leaving because of how they're developed (or more accurately, how they're not).

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Pause Like a Pro: The Secret Weapon of Elite Performers
Linkedin
May 25, 2025
I was recently at an NBA game and talking to one of the players after the game as he was doing his cool down stretches. We had to cut our conversation short as he had to run for the post-game debrief with the team and coach. That’s where they reviewed what went right, what didn’t, and what could use fine-tuning.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

The Challenge Mindset: High Performers Don’t Ask If—They Ask How
Linkedin
May 11, 2025
Dr. Peggy Whitson is set to go to space next month as the commander of Axiom Mission 4, but that almost didn’t happen. When she first started her career, she worked as a biochemist at NASA. She always wanted to be an astronaut, and had applied, and reapplied for ten years.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

The Success Formula: Ritual, Repetition, and Relentless Basics
Linkedin
April 27, 2025
Whenever I finish interviewing an award-winning high achiever, I always conclude the meeting by asking them where they keep their medal. Of the hundreds of people I interviewed, only three had it on display. Everyone else has it tucked away–a box under the bed, the safe, or parents’ house. A recent 3x NBA champion told me his rings are in a brown paper bag in his sock drawer

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Myth Busted: Success Doesn't Require Reading 8 Hours Daily
Linkedin
April 11, 2025
Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Mark Cuban are notorious for reading 3-8 hours a day. But it's not reading that made them billionaires. It's connecting dots others don't see.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Your Inner Circle Can Make or Break You
Linkedin
March 30, 2025
Spring is here, and it’s the perfect moment to take a quick pulse check: Are you on track with your goals? If yes, that's fantastic—keep the momentum going ! But, if you’re finding things aren’t quite clicking, it might not be your motivation; it might be your environment.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

Unlocking Motivation: Are You Tapping into the Right Kind?
Linkedin
March 16, 2025
What drives you to succeed? Is it external recognition like promotions, awards, or financial rewards? Or is it the deep, internal satisfaction of doing work you love? Understanding what fuels your drive is essential for long-term success—and it all comes down to intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

3 Books
The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring: A complete guide to effective mentoring
Amazon
February 20, 2024
The research on mentoring is clear. Those who are mentored, out-earn and outperform those who are not. They make higher salaries, get promoted more often, have greater job and career satisfaction and lower rates of burnout. For organisations that invest in mentoring their employees, they benefit from higher productivity and greater loyalty. Mentoring works as a great retention tool. But despite all this, only 76% of people understand the undisputed benefits of having a mentor, and only 37% of people actually have one.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance
Kogan Page
January 25, 2022
What do astronauts, Olympic champions and Nobel laureates do differently that allows them to achieve at such a high level?
High achievers share the same four attributes (intrinsic motivation, perseverance, strong foundation, constantly learning through informal means). The key to their success is that they do all four of these things in tandem. Based on research and in-person interviews with astronauts, Nobel laureates, and NBA and Olympic champions, The Success Factor outlines the methodological approach that individuals aspiring to improve their performance can adopt to achieve success.

Using these four shared attributes as a guide, The Success Factor helps you reach peak performance by applying the lessons of high achievers in your own life: identify your passion using a Passion Audit; learn how and where to find a mentor and how to build a mentoring team; develop your own community of practice; pursue your interests through informal learning; and manage your time and energy. The Success Factor comes with online resources that feature a downloadable Passion Audit worksheet, Mentoring Team worksheet, and Goal Audit worksheet. The book offers scripts for approaching potential mentors and a list of uncommon places to find a mentor, such as webinars, airports, and social media.

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Tags: Innovation, Management, Leadership

Handbook of Research on the Efficacy of Training Programs and Systems in Medical Education
Amazon
December 27, 2019
The content of medical education knowledge transfer is compounded as medical breakthroughs constantly impact treatment, and new diseases are discovered at an increasingly rapid pace. While much of the knowledge transfer remains unchanged throughout the generations, there are unique hallmarks to this generation's education, ranging from the impact of technology on learning formats to the use of standardized patients and virtual reality in the classroom. The Handbook of Research on the Efficacy of Training Programs and Systems in Medical Education is an essential reference source that focuses on key considerations in medical curriculum and content delivery and features new methods of knowledge and skill transfer.

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Tags: Innovation, Leadership, Management

2 Media Interviews
The Secret to High Achievement with Dr. Ruth Gotian
Secrets of Supermom
September 23, 2021
Today we find out the secret to high achievement! Have you ever wanted to be the absolute best in your career? Become CEO? Win a world championship? Go to the Olympics?

Dr. Ruth Gotian, success expert, Chief Learning Officer and Assistant Professor of Education at Cornell Medicine, and author of The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Performance joins us to talk all about success, extreme achievers, and high-performers. She shares the secrets that those people at the top of their careers use to succeed and how we can apply them, too!

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Tags: Leadership, Business Strategy, Education

From the Finance world to Groundbreaking, World Class Doctor, Dr. Ruth Shares the Deep Secrets of Success and Optimization to Enhance Your Lif‪e‬
Apple Podcasts
February 04, 2021
Dr. Ruth Gotian is the Chief Learning Officer and Assistant Professor of Education in Anesthesiology and former Assistant Dean of Mentoring and Executive Director of the Mentoring Academy at Weill Cornell Medicine. She was hailed by the journal Nature and Columbia University as an expert in mentoring and leadership development and is currently a contributor to Forbes where she writes about ‘optimizing success’.

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Tags: Management, Leadership, Finance

6 Podcasts
Episode 6: Optimizing Your Success by Dr. Ruth Gotian (How high achiever learn daily‪)‬
Apple Podcasts
February 07, 2021
The Mentor Project’s Optimizing Your Success show hosted by Dr. Ruth Gotian. The topic for today's shows include:

How high archivers learn long after they finish formal education. Their education and learning journey never ends.

Learn more about the host Dr. Ruth Gotian visiting The Mentor Project website at www.MentorProject.org.

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Tags: Management, Leadership, Education

Episode 5: Optimizing Your Success by Dr. Ruth Gotian (how high achievers get ahead‪)‬
Apple Podcasts
January 30, 2021
The Mentor Project’s Optimizing Your Success show. I am pleased that we will once again have a special mystery guest who is sure to knock your socks off! The topic for today's shows include:

How archivers get ahead and what we can learn from them to optimize our success.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

Episode 4: Optimizing Your Success by Dr. Ruth Gotian (meeting interesting people during Covid-19‪)‬
Apple Podcasts
January 23, 2021
The Mentor Project’s Optimizing Your Success show. I am pleased that we will once again have a special mystery guest who is sure to knock your socks off! The topic for today's shows include:

How to meet interesting people while social distancing during Covid-19 pandemic.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

Episode 3: Optimizing Your Success by Dr. Ruth Gotian (Role model, mentor, coach, sponsor‪)‬
Apple Podcasts
January 16, 2021
The Mentor Project’s Optimizing Your Success show. I am pleased that we will once again have a special mystery guest who is sure to knock your socks off! The topic for today's shows include:

Role model, mentor, coach, sponsor... What’s the difference?

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Tags: Management, Leadership

Episode 2: Optimizing Your Success by Dr. Ruth Gotian (Finding Your Tribe‪)‬
Apple Podcasts
January 09, 2021
Within this episode, Dr. Ruth Gotian will talk with the listeners about the ways they create and fosters their tribe.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

Episode 1: Optimizing Your Success by Dr. Ruth Gotian (How To Be More Productive‪)‬
Apple Podcasts
January 02, 2021
How do high-achiever get so much done? During this episode, you will learn about productivity hacks and ways to time manage and organize better.

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Tags: Management, Leadership

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