One of the things the Wall Street super nova explosion resulted in apart from lost fortunes (or stories of past fortunes), prison sentences and forced sales of homes and private castles, is introspection on the part of some of the bankers (junior and senior) who rode the wave either thinking :
(1) they would get out of this dirty business when they have made their $X Million (X increases exponentially with time and success) or
(2) being a banker was a cool thing to do, and a cooler thing to say - to the skimpily clad girl/guy at the new club in the meatpacking district of New York city - on the one weekend that you had off from making excel models or pitch books (marketing material for deals). If you were lucky not to pass out by the first two drinks and take the girl/guy at the bar home, it would only be to have yourself dumped soon after for answering your Type A boss's frazzled questions on your blackberry while making out. Yep, that's your average entry level banking analyst.
or
(3) Everyone after business school is becoming an investment banker. Sounds good, especially since it will help me pay off my gigantic B-school debt.
Then there were those who really enjoyed doing deals, and loved the thrill of making the fees. And were good at it. Many of those have survived.
Regardless, in my eternal quest for my calling in this world I asked many - and sounded foolish - "do you like what you do " or "is this your calling" or " why do you do what you do" ?
Check out the range of responses :
"I wanted to have enough in common with my husband, so I would be able to relate to him in the future as well" - there it is ladies!! The secret to a happy marriage - its not all those things self help columns tell you it is, its not the sex or holding hands or having vacations together without the kids, and you can now stop worrying about getting home in time to put food on the table before the husband gets home, or going to the gym to be in shape. All you need is the ability to talk shop with your husband! Jeez- who knew?
" I don't despise it, and am fairly good at it. And I don't have to fight with my husband for my annual Chanel/Louis Vuitton fix" - Ah the life-style argument by the LV -Chanel/Lamborghini -Maserati loving people. Sadly, not one that I can support- because I don't have much of a fixation for luxury goods - and don't want to go to LA and Miami to flaunt my latest LV bag. And what do these folks do, when their luxury goods motivated careers plateau because of a lack for a real passion for business - they become chefs, nutritionists, wives of senators or remain middling cogs in the Giant American Corporate Wheel.
I have somehow concluded that frequently people are capable/interested in pursuing a career different from the one they find themselves in. Their worst fears come true when they find themselves in a career at 40 that they don't love very much and are not the best at - a realization I have known several senior bankers to have, especially in bad times when only the really good ones survive because they have a passion for what they do.
Prior to my current job I worked on the trading floor for a giant bank, and sat next to this senior banker who had been in banking for 20 years, was always in the office, but did not seem to get a single transaction underway. From what I could tell he had been fired from two previous jobs, knew only a handful of people in the industry (it is serious career suicide if you don't know enough people on the "street") and for the most part did not have support of the powers that be in the bank to push any of his deals to fruition. In rare quiet moments, over a Seamless web dinner (Seamless Web is a web site listing nearby restaurants for dinner that lowly folks are entitled to as a reward for staying late) he would admit to making a wrong career choice, and his love for gadgets and software and that his best years were those spent getting a degree in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Delhi. He was about 46, had three children and a mortgage. He was fired, again, in the wake of the crisis.
I remain unconvinced after talking to several people on Wall Street that this is indeed they were meant to do. And even as failed bankers yanked out of Wall Street maze either re-invent themselves to prepare for a different career or decide to keep chipping away, maybe there is no black or white answer to my question, maybe many of them don't bother answering it at all. When they realize its too late to have the career of the historian, the Egyptologist, the oceanographer or the astronaut that fascinated them when they were 12, I think the balance people settle on is something they are not bad at, that pays the mortgage and contributes to the college fund for their children and then they hope that all of those factors collectively gets them out of bed every morning. And soon they find themselves in this morass, this endless cycle validated for its purposefulness from time to time by an occasional deal, dinner at a fancy New York restaurant or a few fleeting moments of joy on a vacation at Turks and Caicos- replete with celebrity sightings no less.
For many others though, it continues to be a long quest.
No comments:
Post a Comment