A stockbroker should never stray from the basic principle: be neutral to the deal. Meaning, if it goes south for one party or the other, you win.
It only matters that the deal goes through. You trust to the market to sort out whether it was a smart deal or not, whether it was good for investors or consumers or ultimately a bad move for society at large.
None of that's your problem - so long as you get your commission for working the deal and making sure both sides of the table commit to the specific language of the contract, you're good.
I think I've lived a lot of my life like a broker.
And I'm not sure if that's alright.
Working life taught me early on that it's rough out there. I graduated in the midst of a recession, much akin to this one - not as bad but bad enough that my first job out of college was working part-time at my father's auto garage. Not exactly what any of us had in mind.
It is my understanding that would be a life-saving job for some folks now... and I am glad to have had my Dad's getting my back that summer.
Ultimately I would go on to graduate school; I had that option.. which brings me to options.
I never sought out a niche. Rather, I have spent my working life deliberately cultivating a broad range of skills because my early experience was - the rug can come out from underneath you at any time.. and definitely will again.
And that happened, repeatedly.
Borrowing a line from a movie I saw while recently on jury duty, The Perfect Gift - I've lost everything several times. It's a great place to start over.
Now, I know most people who are actually in dire straits on Christmas morning are not going to appreciate a feel-good throwaway line.. There is a kernel of truth in that statement but the thing is, I've never had to face the prospect of dire economic peril with a family.
Tens of millions of folks out there do. And do right now. On Christmas morning.
So... over the course of 20 years I learned how to do a vast number of economically valuable things. None are profoundly wow-worthy in isolation.. but my goal was not to be rich but to have options, if the rug went out and my feet went up again.. I would land, bruised but not broken. And get back up.
As it turned out it was good conceptual training for investing.
Everything in the Industrial Revolution-derived societies insists - find your specialty. Find your calling. Set yourself up for doing your One Special Thing. This Meta-of-metas messaging has only been amplified in the Computer Age, the Internet Age - since globalization as we currently understand the term is just a rebranding of a trend that started five centuries ago with the Portuguese Mariners and the Spanish Conquistadores. (Hey, we can loot, er, develop all this!)
Investing. If there is one rule it is do not place all your eggs in one basket.
I look around and see a civilization dying of over-specialization on the one hand, and over-commoditization on the other.
No one is special and yet too specialized at the same time.
It seems to drive people to distraction. What do you do? Get more training in your core expertise or branch out? Do you dig in where you are, community-wise, or take a chance with a move cross-country (or going overseas?)
Oddly enough, I had plans to work overseas and stay working there. It did not quite turn out that way. I live not an hour from where I grew up. My big move was from a small town in upstate South Carolina to Charlotte, North Carolina. Woot.
I let my life drift through a series of changes, adapting my outlook and expectations as I did so. I did not take my working life to be my need to honor in every particular some sort of Great Social Contract with my employer - because I figured out pretty quickly that there is no such deal being honored on the other side. If I was useful, I was there. If not, I was out. That's working life for you.
I can't speak of true destitution. I've had episodes of having no money, no digs, no car.. and they're all a long time ago in much kinder and less leveraged circumstances. Losing everything now would well and truly suck.
I might say to myself - I win either way. It all turns out fine. Just stay neutral to the 'deal', and keep on making deals. Make those compromises and shifts in expectations that keep me keepin' on.
After all, I have far greater incentive now - my wife and two little boys. They look to me to do the heavy lifting finance-wise.
This means I can't indulge in all sorts of Walter Mitty-like entertaining notions of escape from a life that I have, in little steps and small, chosen for myself.
I live the sum of all the deals I have ever made in my life.
This past year has given me Christmas early, in the sense I was almost given the gift of losing everything (and most certainly WILL get that gift eventually, same as everyone in the room).
So it was a good opportunity to reflect on life - personal life, professional life and of course, this most excellent blogging life.
I think the world is so confusing and comes at you in so many ways that most of us are just coping with all of life's challenges using with a short algorithm - the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
We're short of resources, of attention, of sleep, of nutrition, of comfort, of respite of any kind. Of space to live, to work, to play, to simply be.
We live in a vast information dense world that no one human mind could possibly grasp without deep abstraction, superstition, prejudice and signal error getting in the way.
We don't see the world straight - or even the same way. Our chosen modes of analysis are different and getting more so. We come to very different decisions. We entertain different motivations. We are fragmenting as a society and an economy and the first way we see these shattered pieces is in each other and in the mirror and this scares us terribly.
It just sucks the energy and creativity right out of a person.
We're just trying to deal.
Which brings me back to deals.
I've spent a life making deals to stay paid, housed, clothed, wheeled, fed and in a modicum of social standing.
A lot of squeaky wheels have gotten a lot of grease.
But is that living? What makes it worth doing? Worth coping?
I think none of us can live life completely as brokers - as the sum of all our deals.
It's an empty life... it's not an existence, only persistence. Like being a ghost in your own skin.
Yet that is where we wind up, when we just... deal. All of us are overwhelmed. You, me - that "young feller from Chicago" that my 99 year-old grandmother helped vote in as President despite her, well, historic views on how to gauge the personal merits of an individual. Yes, he's dealing too.
I don't really have a political point past - sooner or later, we all set aside grand dreams of what we want to be (ourselves and our world) - because we must. Because idealism with no practical foundation (read: busting a hump in the real world and getting paid, for starters) is escapism.
Yet, we can only take our self-congratulation for Joining the Real World so far. If all we are doing is.. dealing...then we've dealt ourselves and those we love a bad hand.
Being position-neutral works for brokers. But we are always party to our own lives. We are never indifferent to our own happiness and that of those who stake their happiness, in part, in us.
Sometimes you have to trust - you're not indifferent to your own visions. They matter to you. Greatly. They matter to the people who love you.
I am wrapping up now. I am watching my youngest son munch on an orange wedge in a nearby chair. My older son - I can hear him snapping Lego block pieces together around the corner. In yet another room, my wife is chirping about something Missouri Synod-related with my father-in-law.
These people in my life - all of them. I have chosen their presence, every one. They have their own copes and deals to make. They have their various needs of me, and I of them.
But it's not a sum of deals that binds us.
We're family.
We have chosen this. We have chosen a definition of love and trust and presence for all our days.
And, ugly truth being what it is, it's a 'deal' of a kind that gets broken in little ways and undermined greatly in others. Every family has them - The arguments that never had a start and as a result never quite end. Then there are the unexpressed resentments and inarticulate grudges; the 'deals' that never get discussed. Those are the worst of all.
So, we are more than deals. More than people who are dealing with life and (yes) each other as best as we think we must in the moment. And we often misjudge the situations completely.
But we have to trust ourselves to try.. and that others who we have chosen into our lives are trying to not just deal.. but trust and love in full measure as well.
And maybe, given the particulars of this day in many homes across the planet, this is where we should all refocus.
Because if we are not dealing with one another in a spirit of trust, of hope and of love - we should rethink the sum of all our deals, and how to start afresh and get our lives from persisting back to really existing.
... BONUS VIDEO!! ...
Something to do that rethinking with.