There are a handful of things that even many highly successful people are fearful about and amateur at doing.
Public speaking is often talked about, but one that haunts us daily is our fear of selling.
All day every day we’re “selling” ourselves and our ideas, but even many who sell for a living lack the skills they need to do it well, let alone confidently.
Fearful being “salesy.” Fearful asking for the order. Fearful hearing no. Fearful being rejected. Fearful facing objections…
“So, what, I buy another car, or house, or plane, then what?” He asked me.
“That’s exactly my point,” I responded.
“It’s lame isn’t it…”
Still too often I hear seemingly ambitious types talking like rap stars about the G650 that they so desperately wish to own.
Of course few will ever make “yacht money,” and some who do will end up just as unfulfilled as the others.
I’m never surprised when I hear about another billionaire who’s all messed up, with their drink or trophies or insecurities or stupid money being thrown around on this or that.
When you can buy whatever you want, where’s the excitement in getting that new thing?
In the dripping in oil rich Arab countries where you’re “bored” into money you see the extreme desperation of the rich.
Prominent license plates cost more than the custom Ferraris and Lambos they’re pasted on—this sad man paid $14.3mm for his #1 license plate—because bored people “spend” their lives playing status games.
I borrowed that headline from a Bloomberg article on an ex-Barclays trader who is on trial for rigging the Euribor market.
Supposedly as a strategy to downplay his seniority and hence his guilt, he compared being a vice president at Barclays as “equivalent to the guy that serves you in McDonald’s.”
By making comments like, “As ridiculous as it sounds, a coffee boy at Barclays gets paid 400,000 pounds a year” he proved his wanker banker status, but he was also speaking some truth.
“Vice president is not what everyone thinks it is,” he stated. “It is junior.”
After reading our report on Living Dalio’s Principles a client put a good question to me.
Is it possible that we give too much credit to Dalio’s principles because we’re biased by his success?
Yes, absolutely.
It’s entirely possible that while Ray asserts principles as the cause of his success, the radical truth is that we have no way of actually measuring their causality.
How could we?
Surely there are people out there with great principles and terrible results and those with great results and terrible principles. Heck, for all we know there is an alternate reality in which Ray Dalio is even more successful without having even thought about a principle.
That’s the hard thing about “modeling” success. We can’t know what drives it.
Some people tell stories of how they got lucky and won the lottery, whereas others say they deliberately picked the winning numbers.
A way you might assess their skill is to have them replicate their success—which Dalio has done for years—but even then you might still struggle to distinguish skill from luck.
All success is similarly squishy to model.
Is Tom Brady’s success the product of his rigorous TB12 Method, or would he have crushed it anyways? Who knows?
What about Michael Schumacher? For decades he raced at 300 km/h, yet he was permanently disabled in a skiing accident. Was he under-skilled or out of luck?
Did Mark Cuban get lucky because he sold Yahoo! stock at the right time? Is Zuckerberg a genius or was he lucky he wasn’t born in 1885? Was Myspace just less lucky?
This article I wrote last week on why bankers lives suck really struck a chord.
Speaking to many people on Wall Street it’s clear that there is a serious problem that banks are seemingly looking to solve.
This one article drove more traffic to our websites than anything else I have written this year.
If I were an internet marketer I would exploit it by writing about the same topic over and over again, but that’s lame to me and I won’t be writing about this again.
That said, I would be a terrible advocate for the amazing stuff we build at BLK if I didn’t say that we would love to partner with a big bank in building this program.
It’s sad to say it this way, and this isn’t some emotional marketing, but…
In the last handful of years this program we have built for transforming how you win in banking may have, literally, saved analyst lives.
I know that’s heavy, but no kid should die from a fucking desk job, and it’s up to us adults to solve the problem.
And there’s more…
On the lighter side, the bank that we build this program with will find all of their employees will get happier, better, more loyal, and in every way love their job and their life more.
AND, YOU WILL ALL MAKE TONS MORE MONEY.
If you want to save banker lives and win more, please reach out, we’d love to chat.
Investment banking is hardly known for its cushy lifestyle, but every now and then we’re reminded of just how bad it can be.
Earlier this week a buddy forwarded me this email message from a staffer at Moelis.
I don’t know whether it’s legit or not (I’m told it is), but irrespective it’s hardly a unique message in investment banking.
Long story short, the staffer (who is responsible for assigning bankers to projects) sent an email to his team after walking the floor at 2am, and noticing how many seats were empty.
As he supposedly wrote—
Given that new staffings continue to flow in and you are all very near capacity, the only way I can think of to differentiate among you is to see who is in the office in the wee hours of the morning.
Can you imagine that?
You’re working your ass off 7 days a week in a grueling job, and now you’re being judged on how busy you are based on whether you’re in the office at 2am?
I can. I lived that life, and I also did a year in the job of staffer.
While it’s easy to beat up on the staffer for his lack of managerial skills (and judgement in sending that email), I can attest that it was perhaps the hardest job I did in banking, where you’re constantly pulled and pushed in every direction.
It’s demand and supply, baby!
As the staffer, you have a limited pool of resources to assign to projects, and unlimited mouths to feed.
In my experience it was the rare senior banker who would step back and really think carefully about the work that needed to be done (blast from the past shout out to George Lee, Mike Wishart and Kevin Quinn), and whether it was worth having someone sit up all night and do it.
Generally, that’s not because senior bankers perceive working like a medical resident as a rite of passage, or they don’t care about their team, but because they also have mouths to feed.
Clients. Bosses. Shareholders. Enormous, enormous pressure to perform.
As Lloyd Blankfein once put it, the culture of insecurity runs all the way to the top in banking, and while senior bankers might want to help their juniors have a more balanced life, most of all they want to deliver their best for their clients.
In life and in our work, it can be easy to lose our sense of value.
We look around at other people who are seemingly achieving more than us, “worth more,” or otherwise more valued, and we can get down on ourselves.
But when we look at situations differently, take control of our thoughts, and begin taking new actions, we quickly turn around those old ways of being.
This begins with seeing that only you are in control of how you value yourself, and influencing others to value you the same!
A world of hard-charging ambitious people, every year many people find themselves feeling undervalued.
Lots of things in our jobs, whether it be compensation, promotion, recognition, or otherwises can leave you feeling undervalued.
It’s not to say that it’s “never enough,” but that for the amount you put in, you deserve to expect a lot in return!
I had a meeting last week with a Wall Street investor who felt let down on his comp.
And to be honest, he was right, the head of his firm did let him down.
It’s not because he didn’t pay him what he “deserved” but because of the way he had handled the conversation.
Rather than sit with him and explain why the firm’s performance didn’t enable him to pay his team as he would have liked, the boss got angry and defensive.
That left him feeling undervalued, and in the wrong state of mind to drive more value in his career.
Public market investors and traders, by and large, fit a certain mold. They are:
And most of all, they are always looking for an edge.
More often than not, we look for edge via outside resources—better research, information, technology, etc.—but in my experience working with top Wall Streeters, the difference between the good and great is never outside of them.
The difference is inside. The difference is their mind.
More specifically, great investors and traders recognize that they have access to more or less the same outside resources. What separates them is, of course, what they do with it.
While the right outside resources are crucial to making good investment and trading decisions, the fundamental tool we rely upon is the 3 pound organ that sits between our ears. Great investors recognize the crucial importance of getting their mind right in the way that they approach each and every trading day.
After this article I wrote about quitting Goldman Sachs took off, I got a lot of attention.
Former colleagues and others wrote me wanting to know more, yet there was also some confusion about what I stand for.
My message has never been, and never will be: Quit your top job on Wall Street.
Too many faux experts preach mantras like:
The only mantra I use is this:
“Live the life YOU truly want”
Do you see the difference? I’m into how you create your dream life. People who follow the faux experts are into creating an easy life.
Top performers don’t want an easy life. They want to challenge themselves to win, and take it as far as they can go.
If you want to rise to the top of your industry, then quitting a top job is the last thing you should do.
Everyone has an opinion on surviving a recession. You remember all those terrible news spots and articles in 2008:
And underlying all that advice is one thing:
Happiness in your career and life is irrelevant, just so long as you feel a little safer financially.
If that’s how you feel about your life, then there’s no reason for you to read ahead. Happily stagnate forever. If you want to live a life where you are constantly moving forward, where you are always bettering yourself and moving towards what you truly want, then read on.
6 AM meant it was time to check voicemails. 11 PM meant it was time to check voicemails again. Every second in between reserved for cranking and putting out the many fires guaranteed to crop up that day.
That was my life as a Goldman Sachs VP, and despite what you might assume, I didn’t hate it.
I didn’t get there by accident. I’d worked that hard since my first job at KFC to get where I thought I should want to be, and by all accounts I was crushing my goals.
Except they weren’t my goals. Despite my success, despite the deep friendships I’d made at Goldman, I could never shake the sense that I was living someone else’s idea of success.
At a certain point, it was time to leave.
When two multi-billionaires dispense advice, it pays to listen.
It especially pays to listen when both men are not just exceptional investors, but exceptional thinkers.
In his latest memo, It’s Not Easy, legendary investor Howard Marks tells the story of a lunch with Charlie Munger back in 2011.
Finishing up Munger said to him, “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.” Marks goes on to say that achieving outsized success is hard and anyone who thinks otherwise is overlooking the complexity.
As he tells it, they are operating at first-level thinking. They are doing the same things as everyone else and hoping for a different outcome. Those at level-two, however, are thinking at a higher level.
He was writing about investing, but you can equally apply his idea to all success.
Nearly everything we learn in our society suggests that the formula for success is easy. Blood, sweat, and tears, put your head down and work hard, we learn that success comes through sacrifice and brute force.
At first-level thinking it is true that success requires an obvious level of “sacrifice,” but first-level thinking is likely to disappoint.
Most people will run themselves ragged forever chasing success and even those who sprint to complete the marathon are like the many who visit the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, mostly standing around wondering, is this all it is?
The real rewards for success come at the second-level where you recognize success isn’t about reaching an illusory outcome but who you are becoming along the way.
It isn’t about working hard, but doing hard things. It isn’t about your outcome but mastering your craft. It isn’t about pounding away, but stepping back, thinking at a higher level, and developing a sophisticated process for getting what you want.
Either way, it isn’t easy. But it is stupid to grind it out when you can just as easily step back and go for what you truly want.
At dinner with one of my friends and former bosses he told me that all of the bankers in his group had seen my videos.
So, naturally, I asked him, “what do they think?”
Now, not to be one to pull punches, and because we know each other well, he just said to me, “well, it’s mixed.”
And waving his hands side to side like the French do when they use the phrase, “comme ci, comme ça,” he went on to say, that some of the bankers in his group think my work is very interesting and the rest think I’m smoking crack.
Now. Just for the record, truth be told, I’ve never smoked crack, but more than once I’ve heard the accusation…
And so I asked him, roughly, what percent of people do you think fall into the category of me not smoking crack? He thought about it for a bit and then said, about 25% (although I think he was being generous).
And I tell you that felt pretty good to me.
That’s because for as long as I can remember almost all people I’ve met have thought my work to be pretty out there. Not because my ideas are, they are of course very logical, but moreso because they tend to look at me like, “who does that?”
And they’re right! Who does that?
I went to McDonalds the other night. I don’t remember the last time I did but it was likely also with my parents. We were on Sunset, in West Hollywood. Just like a child I stood next to my parents waiting on our Big Macs and my mother’s tailor-made cheeseburger – no pickles, no sauce. While we waited I watched the crew go about their work. And I thought about my work.
It reminded me of being a kid working part-time at KFC. I worked there a number of years, cooking chicken and serving customers. Truth be told, it was one of my most fun jobs. I learned many of my career principles from my part-time jobs, and it was KFC that taught me some of my most important. Standing at the counter with my parents, on my blackberry I started to type – My top 5 lessons from KFC to Goldman Sachs.
“Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find that the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees.” Warren Buffett
I recently quit Wall Street to help improve the investment industry. I do this through promoting intelligent investing in the form of low-cost indexing – google it, literally.
Despite the emphasis Wall Street places on active investing strategies – stock picking, mutual funds, etc. – the arguments in favor of low-cost indexing have been made over and over and over. In fact, the arguments are so simple, factual, and conclusive that they can be condensed into a handful of bullets:
Unfortunately, despite the conclusive arguments in their favor, index fund assets only account for around 5% of mutual fund assets.
As Charles Ellis writes, “leaving almost 95 percent of assets in the hands of wealth-destroying active managers.” Why? Because we don’t invest; we gamble. Improving Wall Street and the investment industry means changing this. It’s that simple.
**ADDENDUM: To my readers in the mutual fund and alternative asset industries. I am a student of investing and am enamored by truly exceptional investors. My views on investing are factual and targeted at the aggregate, not you or your fund in particular. Please stop sending me emails telling me how wrong I am and telling me how much alpha you create. It’s not about you. It’s about your industry. I’m sure you are all above average.