Young Money

P. 227

 Real Life is incredibly difficult. I hope I figure it out. It's possible that figuring it out just means living it, making it as much of a roller coaster as possible. Embracing it, not settling for the path of least resistance, seeing it all there is to see, having beautiful, loving relationships, dancing laughing, understanding, enriching your soul instead of your wallet, realizing that life is a brief opportunity for joy and that those moments that don't contribute to that joy immensely, are really wasted moments. That success in and of itself is meaningless if it doesn,t make you happy.

P, 245

 I couldn't really begrudge them that choice. It's a rare luxury, reserved mainly for children of previlege, to be able to make a job decision straight out of college based solely on passion, with no regard at all for money or security. Most entry-level jobs, in any field, involve corporate drudgery of some sort. And many of the young people I knew in New York who were pursuiong artistic or creative endeavors also had substantial safety nets. In an economic climate whre nearly 20 percent of people under 25 were unemployed, and far more earned less than they should have, it's no mistery why finance jobs remained a desirable plan B. Still, I know people like Jeremy and samson erll enough to know that banking wasn't what they wanted to be doing, and that finance had been a poor use of their skills.

 The British economist had written about the difference between the creative and distributive work. Creative work involves brining something new into the world that adds to the total available to everyone. Whereas distributive work like banking and law only carries the possibility of bearing out competitors and winning a bigger share of a fixed-sized market. Although many jobs in modern society consist of distributive work, there is something intrinsically happier about a society that skews in favor of the creative. There are some people who may derive active delight from the knowledge that their working life is deboted to making sure that someone else loses, but most people do not function that way. They like to have a sense of worth, and that sense usually comes from the belief that they are contributing to society.

P. 271

 .......I don't want to be a Carl Icahn or Bill Gross or Steve Schwarzman. I want to be an L. A. Reid, a Richard Branson, a Micheal Jackson, where the shit I create will impact people forever.

 Real life is hard. I am pretty sure I just made it harder. But I am doing what I wanna do, not what "prestige" says I ought to be doing. GS is firmly a thing of my past, a memory that I never have to relive. I'm thankful for the experience, for all it's taught me about me, for the fact that it was a miserable experience, a quality without which I doubt I would've ever made the jump, and eventually become stuck. So, thanks for the chapter. On to the next.

 - Samson, after quitting GS

P. 278

 Over the past three years, I'd seen surprising changes in all eight of young financeirs I shadowed. A few of those changes were positive, but other changes were more worrisome. I'd seen most of them become less happy and optimistic, more cynical and calculating. There were slower to smile and quicker to criticize. Many of them began to talk about the world in a transactional, economized way. Their universes started to look like giant balance sheets, their appetite for adventure waned, and they viewed unfamiliar situations through the cautious lens of cost/benefit analysis. Many of them, I suspected, would never be able to make art, volunteer for nonprofits, or give their time to nonwork hobbies without keeping a running P&L in their head.

 .....These financiers form an elite class tht will go on to become influential in the top ranks of government, technology, and culture. And if they all share the experience of having spent their formative years working as entry-level bank analysts, performing and internalizing the ethos of the financial sector, it means that, in a way, we've allowed Wall Street's culture to enter our national bloodstream.

......Wall street is just one part of a much larger economy, and it should have no monopoly or brilliance.