5 business tips from the chairman of JetBlue Airways

Currently serving as the chairman of the board for JetBlue Airways, Joel Peterson has quite an impressive resume.

The business guru began his entrepreneurial efforts early, creating a fresh produce delivery service in his Wisconsin hometown which later led way to him acquiring the necessary skills to create Peterson Partners, an investment firm he built from the ground up. Peterson's skill sets extend far beyond the business world, however. He has taught courses in real estate, and currently, teaches classes on entrepreneurship and leadership at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

While Peterson's determination and persistence has yielded him much success over the years, there's one important factor he attributes to fundamental career building: forming high-trust relationships.

We recently sat down with the business extraordinaire, and he gave us insight on creativity, balancing your career and personal life and his recent book "The 10 Laws of Trust."

On the most important thing to take from his book...

"It's worth it to trust others. It has risks, and you'll never be betrayed if you don't trust anybody. You can avoid betrayal in your life, but you'll never be happy, you won't get that much done, you won't be very collaborative -- you'll never innovate. It's risk taking, but it's a risk that pays off. It's one that is a hard one to win, and it's easily lost. If you violate trust, it's hard to regain it -- but it's extraordinarily powerful. If ever you run into trouble in your life, personal or business, the high-trust relationships in your life will see you through the troubles."

On building high-trust relationships...

"You build trust a molecule at a time. Basically, it's by delivering on what you say. Your brand is your promise, so if you have a brand for being high trust, you deliver on promises. I can rely on you to do what you'll say, and there's no gap between what you say and what you do. In short, it's built slowly, and it can be destroyed quickly -- but if you have a high-trust relationship with somebody, it's every efficient. You can innovate together, you can collaborate easily."

On balancing life and your career...

"Balance means you've got something, and they're always in conflict. And the more that you give to one, the more starved the other is. And what I've tried to do is think about how do I harmonize the two. How do I allow them both to thrive so that doing well in the one means I'm doing well or better in the other? [For instance] I tried to always involve my kids in my business. I would take them down to the office on Saturdays, and I would go out and coach their soccer games. I try to mix them a lot and it didn't always work. But I actually think you can do it, you have to create a harmony and make deals with people. You have to let people know where you're coming from. I make deals with my wife. I say, "You know, I'm going to be gone a lot, I'm under a lot of pressure now. Help me out, and once we get this done, I'll step back into this responsibility." You have to stay in a rich dialogue with the people you're working with."

On millennial entrepreneurship...

"I think millennials are fairly entrepreneurial. I don't think they fully understand the cost of it. They kind of want everything at the same time. They want balance, they want freedom they want it all, all the time, and I don't think they fully realize that starting a business is like having a child. When that child is up in the night, you're up in the night. And you may work 80 to 90 hour weeks because you're raising this highly-dependent organism that requires you to be with it. [You have to raise to raise] to a toddler, then get it to become a juvenile. So I don't think they fully appreciate that aspect of it, but they're highly entrepreneurial and highly creative. They're smart and they want to make a difference in the world. They're inclusive. There are 80 million of them, and they're going to be running the world not too far from now. I think [there should be] good dialogues between my generation, the next generation and millennials where we can share with each other our observations. I think we can all help [each other]."

On the questions you should ask in an interview...

"I always think the part of the interview when they're invited to ask me questions is as important. A lot of times, people think they're being grilled in an interview, but I want them to grill me, too. I can't make a good decision unless they're making a good decision. I want them to ask every tough question, everything that they may have been thinking or may have doubts or concerns about. I want to have a chance to respond to them and see if it may not be a good fit. There's no point in hiring someone who is phenomenal but they're not a good fit for your organization. So you're really both solving for a fit -- for happiness and productivity. It's not just an interview, it's a dialogue."