In my last year of the Coast Guard, I read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre. First published in 1923, it’s one of the most influential books on investing ever written. It also changed my life. I was just getting into reading business-y books, and this one really resonated with me.
I started to romanticize business and the stock market. I loved it for the same reasons that people make movies about it: the drama, the dollar amounts, and the modern day battles between the financial kings of the world.
It sent me down a great path for starting a career in the real world, but also fostered an unhealthy obsession with chasing 'wisdom'.
The Hunt for Bad Advice
When I left the Coast Guard, I had two choices — to become a police officer or join a trade, like many of the other guys I worked with, or to go to college. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator made the decision for me.
I went to a non-target school (i.e. one that financial firms rarely recruit from) and studied finance with illusions of becoming a stock trader, whatever the hell that meant.
I became obsessed with seeking advice because I felt I was at a disadvantage from my peers. It gnawed at me that they all had a head start because I was “new” to school and business and “too old” to be starting again. Spoiler alert: I wasn’t.
I went out of my way to consume as much advice as possible and to learn from the greats and the gurus alike. I took all the bad advice I could get, and there’s a lot of it out there.
LinkedIn was just coming onto the circuit, bringing an ever-flowing river of bad advice with it. Lurking beneath messages like “I’m happy to announce…” and “I’m humbled and honored…” is a marketplace for bad advice and freezing cold takes. People sell it in exchange for a few seconds of your attention.
Why? Because it feels good.
My Own Bad Advice
Some advice is poetic and sounds clever, most of it is conflicting, and almost all advice is bad.
Reading advice feels productive, as though we’re preparing for some great battle we’re charging towards, but never comes. While it might feel as though we’re bound for some glory, after we pick up the basics, we’re just procrastinating.
In other words, you shouldn’t read every book on entrepreneurship you can pick up from Barnes and Noble. Instead, just read the best one. After that, every page is pure procrastination.
Let’s fast forward a few years into my current career. Reading that big beautiful LinkedIn cesspool, I’ve caught myself saying things in my head that might have been helpful to a younger me, notes that I wish I could have slipped into my planner ten years ago.
Thoughts like:
“No one cares that you have an A. Go do something real!”
“The soft stuff is way more important than the hard skills.”
“Just be relatable.”
So that’s what these essays are, except instead of going for poetic and clever, I’m shooting for meaningful and concise. I just wish I’d fleshed these ideas out years ago so that my younger self could have benefited.
But as they say, it’s better late than never.
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