Rules and careers

I was thinking about my career today (or lack thereof). As an entry level graduate, I pretty can choose any path in the world - but since freshman year, I chose the finance path. I always wondered, was this the right choice for me? After all, finance is certainly not for everyone - especially the more aggressive forms such as investment banking and trading.

Throughout the years I learned that finding a career that suits you really depends on some key aspects of your personality. I'd like to talk about one of those aspects today: your inclination to either follow rules or break them.

Now, I'm not talking about the middle school vagrants who chewed gum despite being told not to do so, or talked loudly in the back of the class during lectures. These kids were not "breaking" rules - they were not following them. They were being disobedient. That is an issue of character, and does not apply to what I'm talking about.

What I mean by your inclination to break rules - or "norms," is when instead of doing something in one fashion, you choose to try something new. For example, let's say you're working on an essay for your English class. Merely disobeying the rules would be to go to one of those "pay for an essay" websites and get someone to write for you. But breaking the rules would be, instead of writing an essay, you write a short story.

So why did you do that? Maybe because you felt like, an essay could not convey your point of view as well as a fictional story could. Maybe because you felt like the confines of an essay are too limited for your expanded mind. Maybe because you'd rather have an entertaining piece of work to read, rather than a boring, drolling, 5-form structured AAPL approved piece of student trash that no one else would ever read besides your exhausted teacher who has to read over 120 of them.

Do you see what I mean? The kind of people who would rather write a short story than an essay are the type of people who are inclined to "break" rules rather than follow. And let me begin right off the bat - if you're this kind of person, you should NOT be in finance.

Finance is all about following rules. There are a ton of conventions to follow when pricing equities and calculating profits and figuring out the bid-ask spread. Bankers usually leave the rule-breaking to the academics, who then create new rules for the Bankers to follow. If you love following rules, you should be in Finance.

So now you're wondering, wait, Lionel, did you say you're in Finance? But you like to "break" rules? What are you going to do?

I honestly don't know. This is why I am thinking about just going into Sales. Sales is an aspect of banking that is much more client-focused than the other sides, and some creativity is encouraged rather than suppressed. But honestly, if I had to choose another career, I'd much rather have chosen music.

Because in music, you don't follow rules. You break them and people cheer you on. But in finance, when you break rules, all you do is lose money.

Lesson learned.