The first mixologist, Steven, was a torchbearer. The interactions with him defined the experience for us, the customers. It’s easy to imagine that his enthusiasm for the job rubs off on many of his coworkers (with the possible exception of the bartender that replaced him), and elevates the quality of the entire establishment. Employees like him are by far the most valuable, and must be retained even at high[er] cost. The idea of paying every worker the same is fine if you consider your employees to be commodities, but for a truly differentiated business, this shouldn’t be the case.

What does it mean, “create, don’t destroy”? There are countless opportunities every day where we make decisions to add to or subtract from something. Projects at work started by an adversary that you’d rather see fail, cynical observations that don’t have any constructive benefit, favors that you could easily do for someone, but choose not to — these are all chances that we have to build on something, but instead choose to detract from it. There are all sorts of underlying roots — jealousy, political gain, personal grudges — but in each case the effort in the task is designed to undermine.

Instead, spend your time improving anything and everything you can. Even if you secretly want a project to fail, put that aside and contribute earnestly. It might feel good or be easy to criticize or be cynical, and often it is. Far more difficult is actually helping out and building. You’ll find, however, that those that build are far better rewarded and end up far happier than those that destroy. Creation itself is an additive process — the more you create, the more you’ll be able to create. Why waste effort in making something fail when you could have a hand in making it succeed?

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time. [wikipedia]

Some of their best products, such as Gmail and Adsense, originated from this revolutionary policy!

So what does an ordinary company get out of encouraging employees to dream up ways to do things better? Perhaps a day a week is a bit much for most enterprises, but this sort of out-of-the-box thinking can do wonders to spur new innovation or improve operations at any company. Traditionally, change follows a top-down approach: managers devise a new product, process or protocol and the employees implement the change according to instructions they receive. The communication is often one-way so feedback doesn’t effectively flow. The result is few sources of innovation and an inefficient system for improvement.

A better way is to “design” all aspects of the company culture so that any employee can have an input on key aspects of the company. Simply telling workers that “the boss’s door is always open” is insufficient, since it still requires a person to put themselves on the line. Mechanisms like encouraging employees to pursue their own ideas, setting up constant feedback and suggestion sessions (online is particularly good, since people may tend to be more honest), idea contests and frequent communication from management work far better and allow employees to feel that managers are listening and valuing their contributions.

Putting power in the hands of employees to suggest and improve their daily routines has several advantages. It allows the people who know the processes and systems the best to have a hand in improving them, instead of relying on higher-ups who may not be as well versed in the day-to-day. Furthermore, it makes employees feel like they have a chance to stand out in their company and contribute more than a 9-5 workday. The entrenched culture of many companies that exist today makes it difficult to establish such a culture, but the ones who do will find themselves amply rewarded.

So how is management engineering? A business, by nature, is a system. The parts are the inputs — employees, inventory, capital — and profit is the (hopefully steady) output. It’s popular for business managers these days to say that “the value of our business is our employees”, and that is certainly true, but the human nature of an employee means that they are inherently unreliable. Plans change, new jobs come along, retirement beckons — all of these things mean that the human element of the system needs to be designed to be fault-tolerant. An engineer understands this concept, and has a natural insight into ways of building efficiency and redundancy into the organization. A more streamlined process that reduces needless overlap while maintaining critical redundancies will maximize profit and ensure business continuity.

The sweet spot in management is a manager who can balance the vital “soft” aspects of motivation with the organizational awareness that an engineering background can provide. Either trait by itself can do an adequate job, but the combination creates a truly capable and effective motivator and manager.

The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it’s expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working hard to promote the site. I have no formal training in marketing, so my efforts have come mainly from trial and error and also from advice from marketing professionals, both through their blogs and from actually speaking with them. There are other guides on the internet about generating buzz for your website, but most of them are long on generalities (“Know your goals”) and short on details. This guide is an attempt to nail down some of the strategies that have worked for me, and help others that are getting involved in the social marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: this is a work in progress, so I have inevitable missed some key points or approached some things in an unusual way. I welcome your comments below!

Cover Your Bases With the Social News Sites

1. Reddit – catchy, thought-provoking titles are important. The main site gets a huge number of submissions, so posting to a subreddit (a sub-site devoted to a specific topic, like Business or Linux) might increase your chances of making it to the front page.
2. Digg – short titles and good descriptions are important. Be sure to choose accurate categories for your site. You’ll be best off if you’ve been using digg for a while and have built up a base of friends, since they’re more likely to see the story and vote for it.
3. StumbleUpon – tagging your site properly is key, since users see sites based on interests they select.
4. Del.icio.us – tagging is very important, since that forms the basis upon which others find your site.

Get the Word Out On Twitter

It’s important to create a solid presence for your site on Twitter, since it is becoming an increasingly important place for users to share links and thoughts about sites and services. Here are the steps:

1. Create a Twitter identity for your site. For Free Agents, users can follow @freeagentnet.
2. Send out several Tweets relevant to your message to get some good content in your feed so that users have something to see when they first start following you.
3. Advertise your Twitter name on your site — a simple “Follow @freeagentnet on Twitter” will do the trick, and allow users to stay up to date. Also, ask users to add in a hashtag in posts related to the site. For example, if a user Tweets about something unemployment related, they can add #freeagentnet. Hashtags are keywords easily indexed by outside agregators, so you can pull all posts related to your site together on a page.
4. Use Twitter search to find users that are talking about topics related to your site. Start following them. This has 2 purposes: first, it keeps you in touch with what people are saying about the area that you’re in. Secondly, when you follow people, they are likely to follow you if they see that you’ve been Tweeting about the same types of things, so you get a larger Twitterbase.
5. Tweet often about relevant content, new areas on your site, and other information related to your primary goal.

Things to Avoid on Twitter

1. Don’t send out too many tweets each day. Aim for 5 or fewer messages every day, with great, compelling content in them. Never use your “business” account to send out messages like “I’m eating breakfast”, or followers will quickly drop you.
2. Don’t try to follow anyone and everyone. Follow those that you think you’ll learn good information from, and read their tweets. If you’re a follower of the whole world, the information gets diluted
3. Keep your links informational, and not overly promotional. Link to relevant content that you post on your site, but limit the number of links to your top level site, since it only takes a few before people start thinking you’re a spammer.

Create a Facebook Group to Engage Your Friends

Marketing to your friends is a great way to get the word out, especially if its the kind of product that lends itself well to your own demographic (otherwise, why would you build it?). Creating a Facebook group dedicated to your concept and inviting your friends to join is a good way to spread the word on Facebook, since each time someone becomes a member, that information shows up in the feed and others see it.

You can only invite 100 people to a group at a time, so be sure to choose carefully who you add to the invitation. On one hand, you want to pick people close enough to you that will join because you’re their friend and they want to help you out. If you pick people that you barely know, they are less likely to pay attention to the invitation, which means the invite is “wasted” on them. On the other hand, if you choose your 100 best buddies from college, they might all join, but they probably all know each other, and the benefits from your group appearing on the feed are lessened. By choosing some people that you don’t know as well, you lessen the chance that they will join, but if they do, you will likely access a completely separate social circle and your product will hit a more diverse group of users.

Add Meaningful, Relevant Comments to Related Blogs and News Articles

If you run a site devoted to auto repair, you probably are interested in that subject and read related blogs and other sites regularly. If you don’t, you definitely need to, for several reasons. First of all, its important to keep your finger on the pulse of your topic online. If some bloggers break news about Callahan Auto’s new Brake Pad Division, its important to see what everyone is saying about it so that articles on your site can respond appropriately. Secondly, commenting on related blogs is a good way to reach readers that are interested in your subject area.

Commenting on blogs, like other methods of social marketing, walks the fine line between spamming and contributing to a service by adding helpful information and a link. If you run a blog, you probably receive hundreds of spam comments per day, and most are filled with gibberish and a few links. These are obvious garbage, and most get filtered out anyways. However, other posts contribute a brief snippet of commentary, and a big fat link to another site. They often say something along the lines of “great article. check out Zalinsky Auto Parts [url]“. These comments are also garbage, because they don’t contribute anything to the discussion, and are obviously there only to promote another site.

A good rule of thumb is if you can’t contribute something meaningful to the article through your comment, don’t post one. On the other hand, your site may be a great resource to readers of that article. If that’s the case, in the comment box, add a unique point of view, and then somewhere in the comment, mention your site. Most blogs moderate their comment posts to avoid spam, so the more you can contribute to the discussion along with your link, the better the chance that the blog author chooses to keep your comment on the page.

Connect with Popular Bloggers in Your Space

Figure out which bloggers are the most influential in your area. There are a variety of ways to do this — start by Googling for certain keywords associated with your website and see which blogs come up. Add these blogs to your Google Reader (or other RSS aggregator) and start reading them every day. Pay attention to other sites mentioned in articles, and check out their blogrolls.

Once you’ve identified some of the important blogs, contact the author and introduce yourself. Tell them a bit about your site and ask them if they’d be willing to help spread the word. Many blogs are happy to help out, especially if they have the first chance to “go public” with a cool concept. Be sure that you don’t look overly spammy — send polite, personalized messages to each author. I often try to respond to an article the blogger has written to break the ice and let them know that I am a reader and that I find their content valuable.

Engage in Discussions on Other Websites

On some sites, the user community is already large and established. If your product is a great complement to such a site, one great way to promote yourself is to become an active and respected user in the well-known community.

For example, if you have a restaurant reservation service, users on a site like Yelp might be interested in your offerings. One great way to promote your site is to become a very active and trusted member on the “mother site”, and rely upon the fact that your credibility will make people naturally interested in learning more about you and your service. To build this following, you need to contribute content to the existing community that others find worthwhile and valuable, and do so in a way that’s not overly promotional in nature. For Yelp, you might consider posting several restaurant reviews with thoughtful feedback and commentary. You don’t necessarily want to post a link to your site in every review, but definitely have a link in your profile so that when people click on your name to learn more, they see that link and click on it.

You might get fewer impressions by promoting this way (since users will have to see your profile before they see your links), but you’ll get more conversions too, since those who visit your site are people who have already decided that they find you interesting and worthwhile enough to click on your profile. By leveraging your credibility in one arena, you are able to apply it to another to increase the impact you have for each visit.

Overview

Creating online buzz about your product takes time and effort. Simply dumping links all over the internet with very little content around them will simply make you a spammer, and there are mechanisms online that will ensure that your links are quickly relegated to the spam heap. On the other hand, if your product is one that people find valuable, and you promote it with thoughtful contributions to a variety of places online, you will eventually meet success and attract visitors.

Cities like New York currently have ineffective systems in place to clean litter, which consists mainly of spent cigarettes. The way it works now is that workers walk along the sidewalks with brooms and dustpans and sweep stray bits of trash into the dustpans. It works to some degree, but there is no incentive for the worker to make sure to get every single item. By instituting the deposit system of cigarettes, cities would reduce the need for these workers, and replace them by an army of “freelancers”. Within a week, the streets and gutters could be free of all remnants of cigarettes.

I can foresee a few criticisms of this plan. It’s unsanitary and could spread disease. While questionably true, I would argue that a homeless person who collects 200 cigarette butts and then buys a sandwich at a deli is going to be far healthier than one who eats a sandwich or other food from the trash. Cigarettes already have enough taxes added on to them. While I am not in favor of taxing, part of the deposit could be offset by the reduced cleaning costs to the city. The other portion could be written into part of an environmental-type budget. It’s difficult to accurately count the cigarette butts. While there is no machine that currently exists to count them, I guarantee that such a system could quickly be built given some economic incentive. I picture basically a two-stage device — the first stage would be a rough filter that would allow items the size of cigarette butts though, and the second stage some sort of device that measures the volume of material.

What are we waiting for? Enacting this simple solution will reduce litter, give basic jobs to hundreds of people, and provide a (admittedly small, but still existent) boost to the economies of cities.

The recession is undoubtedly a very difficult time for America and the rest of the world. However, during this rough period, its important to realize that things will get better. Here are 7 areas and ideas that will emerge stronger when the economic crisis subsides:

1. Risk will be decentralized and distributed among more, smaller entities. If you were a shareholder of a major investment bank or brokerage, you made phenomenal profits from the late 1990s to around 2007 because all of the “big 5″ – Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley took sizeable proprietary risk on their own books and won as the market was rising and “normal”. However, in the last 18 months, all of those profits and much more have been wiped out because of these same proprietary positions. The problem all along was that few of the proprietary trades were actually generating alpha — that is, excess returns when the investments were adjusted for risk. Instead, they were largely just bets that were 99.9% likely to win, but had a 0.1% (or less) chance of wiping out far more than what they had risked. In the last 2 years, that tiny chance happened, and it took down all the risk takers and decimated models that hadn’t taken into account “tail events”.

   One of the biggest issues was the fact that these 5 brokerages, and others, had grown into financial supermarkets. They traded every product in existence, and the risk between the products was poorly analyzed and managed. Shareholders who bought Merrill Lynch because they thought the private client retail brokerage business was good ended up seeing their money lost to the black hole of CDO writedowns. While there is a definite element of caveat emptor to anyone buying a public company, it is becoming increasingly apparent that nobody fully understands the complex interactions between complex products held by a huge bank. Going forward, investors will be far more careful to separate the risks that they’d like to take. If they want to own a financial trading company because they think there are good returns to be made in facilitating the crossing of trades between hedge funds, they will buy a company that takes very little risk of their own and instead makes money by acting as a broker for low-risk crossing of securities. If they want exposure to a certain market segment or manager, they will invest in ETFs, mutual funds or hedge funds with more structure and oversight to risk taking than the large banks are likely to have. By allocating funds among smaller, more focused entities, investors will be better able to manage and understand the risks in their own portfolios.

2. The financial system will be forced to get rid of large, “too big to fail” behemoths. The other critical concern to the “financial supermarket” model is the impact of the failure of one of these massive firms across the financial system. With leverage, we have seen that one bad area of a company can take down the entire firm. Before derivative contracts were widely used to link risks across the economic system, failure of a firm simply meant that customers needed to find a new brokerage. However, now that hundreds of trillions (conservative estimates put the derivative market notional outstanding at over $280 trillion) of outstanding derivatives contracts link banks together, theoretically a few bad bets by one desk of one bank can then take down that entire bank, which can then fail on derivatives contracts to other banks. The system is far too intertwined in its current incarnation, and needs to be revised.

   The revision will come in part from nationalization and in part from “hiring away” the best members of desks at big trading firms that are subject to the TARP. Since a smaller shop can set up a trading division and not have to worry about restricting incentive compensation, there is huge opportunity for a profitable trading desk to simply leave the large banks and begin trading at smaller places. Before, boutique firms were restrictive because they didn’t have enough capital needed for flow traders to work most effectively; but with capital restrictions affecting desks at even the biggest firms, this is becoming less of an issue. There is definitely still very good money to be made in financial services, so many businesses will remain attractive. The difference will be how they are structured and focused, and that will be the distinguishing factor between the firms of the 2000s and the firms going forward.

3. The reduced allure of Wall Street will encourage the smartest students to start companies or develop new technologies. While I don’t think all the money is gone from finance, I think at least the easy money will vanish for a while. The money remaining for the time being is in hedge funds, and they predominantly hire established traders. For the next few years, it will be difficult to get a great job at either a bank or a fund, so the temptation for engineering students to go into finance will be lessened. Whether this translates into more students opting for engineering careers or simply shifting to another field remains to be seen, but more engineering candidates means more innovation for the country. For more on this, see my earlier post titled Trade Idea: Sell Wall Street, Buy Science
4. Companies that used to be able to survive in a good economy by clinging to old business models will be forced to modernize or perish, and new companies will have a chance to replace the old ones. Traditional newspapers are a prime example. The business model of “deliver newpapers to homes and newstands and make money on advertising and subscriptions” has been showing signs of weakness for over 10 years — since the widespread adoption of the internet. Young people have never grown accustomed to reading their news from a newspaper, and now overwhelmingly get their news almost entirely from the internet.  Since the distribution model no longer works, does this mean that traditional news sources like the New York Times cannot make money and should simply shut their doors? Clearly there is still tremendous value in traditional reporting and the news it produces. However, blogs are stepping in as alternative, often first-hand news accounts that can complement, and in some cases, replace other news outlets. For an example of this, look no further than The Drudge Report, which got its popularity as the first site to break the Monica Lewinsky story years ago. Since then, blogs and other alternative news sources have only gotten more important.

   Without a doubt, some newspapers will go out of business because they are unable to transition their business model to effectively make money on the internet. Other papers, on the other hand, will successfully make the transition and become even more successful because of it. The internet is an amazing thing, and if you’re the best news source on the web, you can make far more money than if you’re the best source in New York City. The increased competition and a greatly leveled playing field will cause the best businesses to naturally rise to the top while the worse performers are filtered out.

5. Internet ad-based revenue models will begin to give way, leading to new models based on hard revenue. Since the beginning of the internet, much of it has been free, supported by only ads, because there was no effective way of collecting tiny payments from visitors in return for content. The processing costs to charge someone, say, $0.01 or even $0.001 for reading an article on a blog was prohibitively expensive, so advertisements became the only source of revenue that a site could rely on. As advertisers reduce the rates they are willing to pay for “clickthroughs”, the advertising model begins to deteriorate, and content providers must begin to seriously look at alternatives.

   On the surface, the end of the completely “free” internet seems like a bad thing, since we have come to expect everything online to be free. However, done effectively, micropayments have the potential to be a game-changing development. Imagine if you could, at the beginning of each month, buy $10 worth of micropayment “credits” that you could use to pay for sites in increments from $0.001 to $0.20. Popular sites could charge a penny or less, and make plenty of money to hire the best staff and provide the best material. Using the newspaper example from above, a premier news provider like the New York Times could charge a tiny amount per user and still make enough money to be a viable company. Sites that were able to thrive on advertising alone could remain free, of course, but the ability to charge small token amounts for content would likely create entirely new and interesting sites and business models that are currently unavailable for the price of free.

6. Companies will look deeper into their operations for ways to reduce costs, which will give an opportunity for new technology products and players to break into the corporate landscape. During the last few months at my previous employer, the company made a concerted effort to identify and cut wasteful spending in areas that were overlooked during earlier bull market times. As we move deeper into a tough economy, more and more companies will scrutinize their existing operations for areas where they can save money and optimize procedures. This process will create an opening for new players in the corporate game that can enter with the promise of lowering costs and simplifying maintenance.

   When times are good, companies are more willing to stick with their current setups that may be old, outdated and expensive, simply because they lack the impetus to really delve deep and cut costs. One very extreme example of this is Microsoft Office. Nearly every corporate employee has Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Outlook on their desktop. However, for almost all of them, these programs are overkill — for their basic word processing or presentation needs, there are several software packages costing little or nothing that could easily suffice for all but the most advanced users. Take, for instance, OpenOffice or Google Docs — both allow you to create Word-format documents and easily share them among co-workers. In a pinch, a company could switch to one of these alternatives and save hundreds per user per year in licensing fees. Perhaps an exaggerated example, since Microsoft Office is ubiquitious on the enterprise scene, but I am confident that any office has dozens of examples of software and other licensed services where they could find alternatives that retain 95% of the capabilities for 20% or less of the price. Companies don’t look for these types of opportunities in good markets, since the profits of the business far overshadow the expensive support costs, but in times where every dollar counts, this is a great area for new businesses to step in and gain a foothold in the corporate market.

7. With less “free money” going around, people will have to genuinely innovate if they want to “get rich”. People can be roughly categorized into two camps — those who create value and those who maintain value. Those who create value — like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett — ultimately provide the jobs and incomes from the next tier who maintain that value. Bill Gates started Microsoft and made billions of dollars doing it — but the billions that he took home was only a small fraction of the value that he created, since thousands or hundreds of thousands of other people made money either directly or indirectly as a result of Microsoft. When the economy is great, those that maintain value can make a very good living for themselves as a result of being onboard a profitable company or having a position in a lucrative niche. In a poor economy, however, the ability to make outsized personal wealth by being a maintainer of value is less certain. Poor economies force people to be more creative if they wish to carve out wealth of their own.

   The creators of value undoubtedly have a more difficult time in a recession as well, but they are more in control of their situation and can more easily adapt than those that have “safe” jobs maintaining value that has already been created. Furthermore, since a steady paycheck is less certain than ever, the opportunity cost of leaving a job and starting up a business is much lower than its been in the last 5-10 years. Therefore, the ambitious people that want to “strike it rich” will be more likely to take risks at creating value, since the path of maintaining value is now less certain and more difficult than ever. Funding and startup capital remains a difficulty, but even that is not insurmountable, and the rewards in the end have the potential to be great. By starting something in a time where estabilished companies are being challenged, a lean newcomer has a rare opportunity to truly shake things up.

I graduated in 2007 from MIT with dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Management. During college, Wall Street was hitting its post-9/11 stride, with CDOs and structured financial products driving firms to record earnings and bonuses to record levels. I took an internship at a major Wall Street bank in the summer of 2006, and then signed on for a job as an equity derivatives trader for full-time. After 3 months of training, I started up in convertible bond trading in September 2007, shortly before Bear Stearns became the first big Wall Street collapse.

Like any shock of that magnitude, people didn’t know what to make of the effective failure of one of the top 5 brokerage firms. Was it the beginning of the end? Or had we hit a bottom? Other firms hadn’t taken any writedowns yet, so everyone had a different opinion of what this meant for Wall Street, for finance, and for themselves.

A year and a half later, it has gotten much worse. Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch suffered similar fates as Bear, and no investment banks remain after Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs opted to become bank holding companies. The future now looks bleak, with the once oversized bonuses now subject to congressional and societal scrutiny more than ever, and leverage looking more and more difficult to get each day.

Clearly, the last year and half was a unique time in the industry, and frankly, in the history of the United States. A few days ago, my involvement with my company came to an end. The decision was not mine, but it was also not wholly unwelcomed. Rather than be bitter about what was or what could have been, I’d rather spend time focusing on what I learned while I was there and how it will help me in the future.

Most central to my experience was my boss. This was my first job, so he defined the working world, Wall Street, trading, and professionalism for me. Let’s start with his lesser qualities — he was very demanding of his employees, tended to micromanage a bit and was generally pretty inflexible to his people taking time off. From time to time, working there felt very confining, because it was difficult to take a day off for an appointment or a long weekend.

Despite these drawbacks, as my first manager, I would rate him an 8.5/10. What does one want in a first job? While it’s great to have a flexible schedule and a boss that is more inclined to let things slide, it’s ultimately not the ideal way to learn anything. The single most valuable thing I learned from my boss is single-minded dedication. Every single one of his bad qualities comes not from laziness or apathy, but from, if anything, too much dedication to the job. At the end of the day, how can you fault someone for being too careful with their business or too involved in the components that make the business run? He was always demanding, but never once anything but completely respectful. For time off, he didn’t take much (aside from the standard week in the summer and week around Christmas), so he expected the same. From a micromanagement perspective, there are worse qualities than knowing whats going on in all parts of your businesses — like not knowing.

While I think the happy medium of dedication is a touch less than his level, it’s nonetheless good to learn from a strong case. For younger employees, working with a boss like this is certainly a challenge, but a challenge in the same way that motivates someone to choose the most difficult university or decide to run a marathon — not something you will enjoy 100% of the time, but ultimately something that will make you stronger as a person.

To a degree, this sort of dedication motivates (or used to motivate) a lot of Wall Street. The end goal — the reason why everyone got up in the morning — is to make money. If you go out every day and give 70%, you may as well be doing something else, because the pure capitalism that permeates the floor means that someone else will work harder and win the money away from you. It’s greed in the ultimate Gordon Gekko sense, and in some areas (the ones that don’t involve taking risks that could wipe out the firm and millions of shareholders) that greed is, in fact, good.

The next important lesson I learned relates to the value of personal connections. I entered with a class of about 40 people who landed in roles across nearly every area of the firm. What this meant for me was that as a new employee, I had a better network than some people who had been at the firm for years! If I needed advice on interest rates, I was never more than an instant message (or Instant Bloomberg) away from someone on the rates desk. Here, Wall Street is a microcosm of life — it’s not as in-your-face apparent in most cases how someone might help you down the road, but you never know how your freshman-year roommate might be able to help you out in the future. Connections, however, are a funny thing — without maintenance, they degrade over time. So be sure to reach out to those that you want to stay in touch with, because you can’t ignore someone for 10 years and then ask them for a job. Services like LinkedIn and Xobni have formal mechanisms for those who want some structure to their goals of keeping in touch.

The final lesson that I took away is the importance of doing something productive with every day of your life. At the peak (or was it the valley?) of my employment, I worked from 5:45am to about 7:30pm — just shy of 14 hours per day. The fewest hours I worked was about 11 per day, from 6:30 to 5:30 or so. The problem working such a hectic schedule is that it leaves little time for anything else in your life. When you get home after 7 and need to be in bed by 9:30, you have little time to devote to any other pursuits. Most days, I just wanted to sit on the couch for an hour, eat a takeout dinner, and then go to bed. It’s a horrible work-life balance and a degenerative cycle: if you do it for 5 years, you will find that you are forced to continue it, because you no longer have anything in your life outside of work. You don’t decide one day that you no longer have outside interests or hobbies — you decide it every night when you watch TV instead of reading or cooking, or pursuing a hobby.

Without a doubt, it’s a struggle — after a long day of staring at a computer screen the last thing that seems appealing is working on a personal blog or reading a few pages out of a book. However, after repeating that routine for a month or two straight, I realized that there are far too many people that fall into that cycle and wake up one day and realize that they are 40 or 50 years old and have little to show for their lives except the money that they earned at their jobs. The hobbies that they used to enjoy or the cultural knowledge that they used to pride themselves on has given way to short-term market knowledge and the info that can be gleaned from browsing the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

In the end, although there were often times where I felt like my job on Wall Street was worthless and even destructive, I feel that what I learned along the way will prove to help me in my future endeavors. It was undoubtedly a rough time to learn with all that was going on in the markets and in the company. However, what my poor timing lacked in terms of the progression of my career was more than made up for with the general lessons that it taught me instead.