My mate said to me—”In their careers many people are either on a melting ice cube or a drifting iceberg.”
Those on an ice cube know they need to make a change, but those on an iceberg can still live with the illusion that they have time on their hands.
They know their career is adrift and that sooner or later they’ll have nowhere left to stand, but they will keep floating as long as they can.
This is one of the reasons I began this work back in 2000.
I looked at the career of investment banking and I didn’t like what I saw.
At Goldman in Sydney I worked with true masters of the universe—BSDs, pre-IPO partners. Not the modern-types, but five Ferraris in the garage type of guys.
I thought, now that’s a career on Wall Street!
But sitting in Menlo Park in 2000 with comp slashed in half and half the office fired around me, I began to see the career differently.
At the time I wouldn’t have said that the investment banking ship had sailed, but over the years I did my work that was how it appeared to me.
I saw the same at Carlyle. All those poor devils running themselves ragged doing generic deals hoping to be like the founders, DBD, but knowing they never will be.
I saw I could work till I was sixty and have a pretty interesting and lucrative career, but I didn’t love the job enough to find that appealing.
When you’ve invested decades in your career only to realize it’s not all it was meant to be, what do you?
As my mate said, “Neither of them is particularly appealing, especially as a budding master of the universe.”
“So, what do you do?”