Winning

I will talk a little bit about how I got a job on Wall Street.

At the time, I was getting my MBA at the University of San Francisco. Funny thing about that program. The education was first-class. Couldn’t have been any better. But its reputation, as a business school, was…not so great? I think, at the time, it was ranked 170^th out of all MBA programs in the country—well into the third tier. I went there because Stanford and Berkeley were incompatible with my Coast Guard work schedule. At USF, I could do all the classes at night. But what I quickly learned was that not all MBA programs are created alike, and at the lower-ranked ones, your likelihood of getting a job on Wall Street were slim to none.

I was undeterred. I exploited every single contact I had, set up informational interviews in New York, and made several trips out East to visit with these people. Not all of these meetings were successful. But my message seemed to be resonating at Lehman, which liked the idea of a scrappy Coast Guard guy becoming a trader. I make it sound easy, but this was not easy. I was working a full-time job, another part-time job (on the options exchange), taking three classes at once, doing all the job search prep and flying out for interviews. I was sleeping two hours a night. But I had what you might call a killer instinct—failure was not an option. I took everything I had and bet it all on myself. It would be one of two big risks I would take in my lifetime, and it paid off.

I have had about 10-12 interns over the years, and I have taught a lot of college students, and occasionally I have smart interns or smart college students, but the one thing that absolutely cannot be taught is the killer instinct. You either have it or you don’t. You either have the insatiable desire to succeed, or you don’t. For every person who has the killer instinct, there are a hundred who are complacent. I have a job, three squares, a roof over my head, life is good. They have enough. Then there is the rare breed of cat for whom it is never enough. They will sacrifice their social lives, their fun, their health, their sanity, in order to achieve their goals. Not many people are willing to make those sacrifices. That is why there are winners and losers.

And I’m not specifically referring to Wall Street. Read this blurb about the writer Michael Crichton, which I found from the Twitter account @TrungTPhan:

Michael Crichton: One of the biggest cultural influences in the 1990s, Crichton scored the trifecta of having the #1 book, film, and TV show in the same year. He did it twice in 1995 with ER (TV), Congo (Film), and The Lost World (book). Oh, and again in 1996 with ER (TV), Twister (film), and Airframe (book). Crichton died in 2008, but his work remains popular, and he’s sold over 200 million books. While getting a Harvard Medical School degree, Crichton would frequently write 10,000 words a day and published multiple novels under a pseudonym before graduating (he never practiced medicine). Steven Spielberg—who adapted Crichton’s book Jurassic Park to film—said that Crichton was known for doing 18-hour work days for weeks on end until a project was done.

That is one first-class motor. Does that make you feel lazy? I hope it does. By the way, the typical book is 85,000 words, so this is writing a book in 8.5 days. For comparison, I write about 3,000-4,000 words a day across all my ventures, and people think that I’m a writing juggernaut.

There is an ongoing debate about whether hard work or talent is responsible for someone’s success. I’m going to go with hard work eight times out of ten. For a period of about twelve years in the 1990s and 2000s, I read virtually every investment book that was available on Amazon. As I write, I have them all on a shelf, next to me. I was reading constantly. Nobody told me to do it. And so I found that I had a lot more intellectual depth than most of the people I was working with at Lehman. Funny thing about Wall Street. On Wall Street, knowledge is power. If you’re the only guy on the equities trading floor that knows how a treasury bond auction works, you are going to become pretty valuable once one of them goes pear-shaped. I think about all the back- and middle-office people who have every resource at their disposal, all the computing power, all the market data, and mechanically do the same VLOOKUPs on spreadsheets every day, without once cracking a book for the SIE or the Series 7. Without getting a subscription to Barron’s. Without subscribing to any newsletters. Without reading any books. And they wonder, perhaps out loud, why they are sitting there doing VLOOKUPs all day when the traders and salespeople are making multiple seven figures on the trading floor. Perhaps it is because they are lucky, but perhaps it is because they did the work. These kids lack the killer instinct. And it doesn’t take much in the way of political skills—you just have to go down to the trading floor and make a nuisance of yourself until they give you the job. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you don’t squeak, no grease. It’s not as if there’s much in the way of risk. The worst they can do is say no!

I am a baseball fan, so I will tell you some baseball anecdotes. Here in Myrtle Beach, we have the single-A Cubs affiliate, the Myrtle Beach Pelicans. A few years back we had a couple of future professional ballplayers on the club: Ian Happ, who went on to play with the Cubs, and Gleyber Torres, who went on to play with the Yankees. Ian Happ worked his ass off. Not being physically gifted, he worked out constantly, doing drills, spending time in the batting cage, lifting weights—and it paid off. He is now a valued member of the Cubs. Gleyber Torres was physically gifted, a natural athlete, but was lazy, and spent most of his time sitting around. Torres now plays second base for the Yankees, but in spite of his physical gifts, is a thoroughly average hitter and is prone to mental errors, both defensively, and on the basepaths. Say what you want about Roger Clemens, but that guy had a first-class motor. His workouts were legendary. When Andy Pettitte visited his ranch to work out in the offseason, he spent the first few days puking.

Back in 2016, Randi Zuckerberg laid out the entrepreneur’s dilemma. You have a list of five things, and you only get to choose three. I have altered it somewhat for our purposes.

            Work

            Sleep

            Friends/Family

            Fitness

            Fun

I choose Work, Sleep, and Fun. I don’t spend much time with friends or family, and I don’t do much in the way of fitness. I always make sure I get enough sleep—sleep is important. And I make time for fun, which usually involves music. And I work all the damn time.

I think a lot of Wall Street people choose Work, Fitness, and Family. They get up at 330am to work out in the gym, they put in a 12-hour workday, and they come home to spend a few hours with the kids. Rinse and repeat.

By the way, if you’re only putting in an 8-10 hour day, then you don’t get to choose work, because everyone puts in an 8-10 hour day. It is what you do with those extra hours that is important. I’m not saying that my choices are prescriptive—everyone has different priorities—I’m only saying that if work doesn’t make your top three list, then you’re not going to be the CEO. You’re not even going to get a job on the trading floor. Spit in one hand and wish in the other, and see which one fills up first. In my career, I have occasionally been outsmarted, but I have never been outworked.

I don’t particularly care if someone doesn’t want to put in the effort. That is a choice, and like we discussed above, people have different priorities. But then you lose your ability to complain that you’re not rich or successful. If you want to chug along and make your $x a year and raise your kids and watch your football on the weekends, there is no dishonor in that. More beer for me.

I have said this before, and I am saying it again here:

The most important decision we will ever make is what to do with the next 24 hours.