No One Ever Told Us That: Money and Life Lessons for Young Adults

CHAPTER FIVE

DON'T BE A WISE GUY

I have seen many hotshots come and go in my working life, people arriving at my firm with big reputations, the cocks of the walk. Almost always they never live up to the hype. I remember a number of these people. One of them demanded that a special office be carved out for himself, with part of the floor where his outsized desk sat raised above the level of the rest of his office. It was like a throne room, so he could look down on and intimidate visitors. He drove a Bentley and chased the sales assistants. He was a great salesman, in the days when the entire stock brokerage business was commission based. If you did not have your customers trading in and out on a regular basis, you had no revenue. If a customer of his objected to his advice to sell something a couple of weeks after buying it, he would say, “I'm the captain. When the captain says, ‘Sell,’ you sell.”

At quiet moments he would tell me, “I was meant to be in this business. I feel that I really know, know what I'm saying? I really know.”

In my experience, anytime in my career when I'm tempted to say to myself, “You really know,” it means that I'm about to have my tail handed to me, and that there are things out there I haven't figured out. Bad behavior and arrogance always get paid back, and not in good ways. The hotshot in my office hopped firms a lot, and ultimately was sued by a variety of clients and forced to leave the business, banned for life, the throne room carved into three ...