I’ve written 5 short stories in the last six months. Some of them are better than others. One of them is excellent. One of them got published. I can tell you that the last six months have been some of the happiest of my life, writing these dang short stories. It is because I am using imagination, which I don’t get to use very often in my day job.
About my day job. My day job is writing about finance. I do it very well—I might be the best at it, or nearly so. But after 19 years of doing it, it is getting a little tedious. That isn’t a statement about writing or finance or writing about finance; if you do anything for 19 years you will start to get sick of it. Problem is, I make a lot of money doing it, so it is hard to stop. But if you asked me what I really wanted to spend the rest of my life doing, it would be writing fiction.
I recently had a discussion with my literary agent about this. I told him that my goal is for my fifth book to be a short story collection. I added that I didn’t want to self-publish it. He told me how hard it was, and having read some of my fiction, sort of implied that it’s not good enough, at least, not yet. He said that even the indie presses that might pay you a $2,000 advance are flooded with submissions, and that it’s a one-in-a-thousand shot. Well, you have to climb the mountain, and this is the hard thing, so naturally I want to do the hard thing. The easy thing would be to publish another finance book, which I could write in the time it takes for me to take a long piss, and sell a shitload of copies.
Part of this is ego. I don’t want to be known as a financial writer; I want to be known as a writer. Period. And I am pretty versatile, and I can do a lot of different things, so I should be able to do it. But really I should stick with what I am good at, and just write financial stuff. I could be the best at it, and it wouldn’t take anywhere near as much effort.
You see this all the time in the corporate world—a company goes public that is good at doing a specific thing, and it does this thing for 10-20 years, and then they get bored and they open up a new business line, and it ends up being a distraction, and it ends up bringing the whole thing down. Goldman Sachs wanted to get into consumer finance and found out that it was a lot harder than it looked. Twitter wants to become a bank. That would be a mistake. Even the banks are not so good at being banks. Banking is a hard business, and it is probably better left to the bankers. Hotel companies are really good at running hotels. Credit card companies are really good at issuing credit cards. A credit card company should probably not build a hotel, and vice versa. You’re getting into things you know nothing about, and you’re going to be way out of your depth, like Goldman was with Marcus. Being smarter doesn’t count for anything. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge that gets passed down over generations. If you’re wondering why monopolies or oligopolies exist, this is why. People have been wondering for years when some wiseass is going to come along and disrupt Bloomberg, which is badly in need of disruption. It is very, very hard. And the chat feature basically made Bloomberg invincible.
That’s not to say that you should never try to change careers. It’s just going to be hard. And it is a lot easier for you to change careers than it is for Twitter to become a bank. Individuals are more adaptable than organizations. People reinvent themselves all the time. But it is rare. When was the last time you heard of a professional athlete who went on to have a successful career in something that had nothing to do with sports? Broadcasting doesn’t count. I guess Steve Young became a successful attorney. Any others? Not many. You’re really good at throwing the ball, but after a while, age and gravity take over, and you stop throwing the ball at age 40, and the problem is you have half your life ahead of you and you have no freaking clue what to do. Bernie Williams plays the guitar, but not well enough to be as successful playing the guitar as he was playing centerfield. You get the idea.
In MBA-speak this would be known as a core competency. You get really good at doing a thing, you should probably keep doing that thing and exploit it for all the money and success that you can. Instead of screwing around with short stories, I should probably be spending that time trying to grow my business. I don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it. Chances are, life will make that decision for me. Maybe I’ll get so rich writing about finance that it will afford me the time to spend on other projects that get my creative juices flowing. Or maybe not.
This is kind of the purpose of a hobby, or avocation. You do this thing which makes you money and pays the rent and puts food on the table, except that’s not the thing that makes you happy, the thing that makes you happy is some other thing that you could never in a million years be financially successful at, so your life is a struggle to find balance between spending time on the thing that makes you money and the thing that makes you happy. I think that is the right way to look at it. I bet you a million zillion dollars that David Solomon would rather be known as a DJ than the CEO of Goldman Sachs. I bet you. And everyone knows this. And the problem is that everyone knows this. Everyone knows that David Solomon would rather be a DJ and Goldman is his day job, so he is perhaps not as focused on being the CEO of Goldman Sachs, which gets people worried. I have a DJ hobby, too, but I get it. But I have long since resigned myself to the fact that in order for me to be more successful as a DJ, I would have to expend a huge amount of effort that I’m not really willing to expend. So I play my 10 gigs a year and that is it. Paris Hilton is a DJ, too, you know. I love Paris Hilton, but maybe that is a topic for another essay. She’s legitimately good. Not really my style—she plays a lot of Bob Sinclar-style house music, but she’s terrific. A lot of people think her success is due to her notoriety as a socialite. We will never know for sure, but I assure you it is not.
So maybe the solution is to not chop down the tree that gives you all this delicious fruit. Keep doing the thing that you are good at, and in your spare time, you can do the thing that you are passionate about. Every once in a while, you find these people where their avocation is their vocation, the people who are passionate about their jobs as I am about my hobbies, and they eat, breathe and sleep finance, consulting, or whatever it is they do, and they become the best at it. There are a lot of people like that in finance. People who put in 20-hour days running hedge funds and such. Honestly, if I’m in a room with a bunch of Wall Street folks, and they start talking about finance, I get bored. I’d rather talk about literature or culture or music. I like what I do—if I hated it, I couldn’t do it, but I don’t eat, breathe, and sleep it. I’ve always told people that if I ever make a fuckton of money, I’m going to build a club in Myrtle Beach. I will do that. I’ve been in a lot of really cool clubs in my lifetime, and I have ideas about what makes a good club. I’d love to see that become a reality.
The other thing is that if you have a hobby or passion project, if you start doing it full-time, there is a very good chance that you won’t enjoy it as much. It turns into a job, and jobs suck. I assure you that if I were a professional DJ, playing 200 gigs a year, flying all over the place, dealing with flaky nightlife people, that too would get old. If I had to write short stories like it was my job, it would probably get old. Or maybe not. But I can tell you that I am more energized to do these things when I have a limited amount of time to do them. You can’t spend 20 hours a day on music. You just can’t.
Remember the First Rule of Windwalking—don’t let go of something until you’ve got hold of something else. You take a decade or two to build up this skill, and it’s worth a lot of money, and you don’t want to just walk away from it. Of course, I did that once in my life—and I’ve never been happier.
One top athlete who had a great second career is Roger Staubach. While still with the Cowboys, he started working in commercial real estate during the off-seasons and launched his own firm two years before he retired from football. Built it up over 3+ decades and sold it about ten years ago for $600 million. He's still chairman of the board I believe.
Appreciate all of your writing - financial and otherwise! Maybe your core competency isn’t exactly finance per se but rather people/human nature?