Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention

We were on the steps of the Sacre Coeur in Paris in the late spring. Night had almost wrapped itself around us and the lights of the city flickered beneath our feet. There was a breeze but enough warmth to hint at the promise of summer.

I was sixteen and it was the last night of a school history trip. For reasons I can’t fathom, our teachers had allowed a bunch of teenagers out by ourselves that evening. I had wandered the streets of Paris with a good friend and eventually – too poor, too shy and too young to indulge in too much hedonism – we found ourselves on these steps at about nine at night with a few bottles of French lager.

It was a time and a place where underage drinking in public was tolerated so long as you stayed civilised. So that’s what we did. We weren’t the only ones there. In that way that you sometimes get in the continent there were groups and individuals and couples scattered across the steps. One of those was a collection of youths probably a little older than us. After a little while one of them brought out a guitar and started to play old Beatles’ songs.

And so, drinking warm lager, looking out over a twinkling Paris, to the strain of Hey Jude sung in an accent the veered between Paris St Germain and the Liverpool Docks via Brooklyn, my friend and I started to talk.

We ranged widely and openly in a way that we never could back on the streets of South London. It didn’t take long to pass through the tried and true topics of girls and bands and sport. Somehow we both knew that this was an opportunity to dive deeper. So we moved onto our hopes, our fears, and our dreams and secret longings.

It wouldn’t respect that memory to share what we talked about.  But, when I look back, I admire the boy that I was. He was brave and passionate, he had ideals but he was also pragmatic. When I’m trying to decide whether I’m living my best life I sometimes ask myself what that teenager would think.

Je ne regrette rien

Saving Ninja’s challenge this month is: “The year is 2030, you’ve just spent your life savings on purchasing a ticket to ‘reset’ your life. You’ve gone back in time to your first day of school. You have a chance to live your life again. You have all of your current memories. What would you do differently?”

To be honest when I look back at that sixteen year-old in Paris or his younger self I’m not sure I would do too much differently. When I look back there are only two things that I really wish I could have told my younger self.  Both of those would be to the younger me at university.

The first thing is important to me but is an embarrassingly trite cliché: I would tell myself to do more work. Keep having fun, but just add in an extra hour or two a day of actually studying for your degree. Not because the degree that you will get will make a difference to your career, but because your subject is fascinating.  And you already know that without being told. You have access to some of the absolute best global minds in your field, world leading libraries and enough time to really get to grips with some complicated topics. Don’t study more for a better mark, study more for the sheer pleasure of it.

He’s just a poor boy, from a poor family

Before I go into my second, and more important, point I should give a bit of context. I come from an ordinary background. Growing up I didn’t know anyone whose parents were lawyers or doctors or bankers or barristers, or even teachers or accountants. I went to a state school and my parents’ friends and my friends’ parents were things like shop keepers, dinner ladies, and low ranked civil servants. The most professionally successful people I knew were a few engineers and a dentist.

If you want to categorise it in particularly British way, I grew up among the middle and lower-middle classes – and very happy I was too. Hold that thought and I’ll explain momentarily why it’s relevant.

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living

When I went to university my horizons on what a career could be broadened. Not only did I meet real people who had done, or wanted to do, things like advertising and software development and acting. I also heard about the world of city jobs.

I was genuinely out of my depth with all of this. Sadly, the university careers was of almost no use. They were geared up to helping people access the big graduate recruitment programmes but if you wanted to do anything else they really weren’t helpful. This was also in the days when the internet was much smaller than it is now and much less useful (I never went online before I went to university and when I did it was using the cutting-edge Netscape Navigator and searching via Ask Jeeves).

What that all meant was that when it was time for me to apply for jobs I didn’t know what to do. The reason I gave that bit of context earlier was because it also meant that I had limited horizons when it came to career advice.

So I asked myself what would that boy on the steps of the Sacre Coeur do? And actually that boy had a clear answer. One of the things that he had said between swigs of lager was that he didn’t know what he wanted to do when he grew up.  What he did know was that by the time he was 30 he wanted to either have a million pounds or be earning a 100 grand a year. Without a vocation that called to me, making money seemed like a very sensible thing to do with my working hours – at least until I worked out what I really wanted to do.

Show me the money

When I was at university the consensus was that if you wanted to make money then you either needed to become a management consultant (and in this I’m thinking more of the strategy houses rather than the IT/HR/engineering consultancies) or a banker (within which I’m including investment banking, trading, hedge funds, private equity). The hive mind also said that if you wanted to get one of those jobs you needed to focus your efforts one of those paths (or sub-paths in banking) as they required different types of preparation. Interestingly, at the sort of university that I was at, the idea of starting your own business wasn’t something that anyone really talked about. I guess we were all so highly educated that it was too easy to find a highly remunerated job.  It meant the risk-reward of starting a business of joining a start-up with sweat equity didn’t pay off for many people.

Anyway. This all looked very sensible to me and when I looked into the starting salaries both management consultancy and banking seemed to start in the same sort of ball park (I either case I would be earning more, much more, than the median UK household salary at the time). It also seemed like I would be working 70+ hours a week in either route which was fine with me (my idle philosophy hadn’t fully kicked in at that point). As a result I decided to go down the consultancy path as it seemed to promise more travel and also more interesting work.

Oh, and looking back, I’m appropriately embarrassed by the casual youthful arrogance that assumed that these sorts of options were normal. Also that I assumed that this situation was down to my ability and decisions rather than a combination of multiple factors that I had no control over and blind luck. Maybe if I was going back in time I would take a moment to tone that down a bit as well.

I want the truth! You can’t handle the truth!

This is where my lack of social capital started to kick in. All I had to go on was what the recruiters were telling me. I hadn’t seen any of my friends that had already started on those paths as they were working all of the time. Naïf that I was I saw banking as involving hours hunched over spreadsheets.  In contrast, while in consultancy I expected to strut around advising the board of FTSE 100 companies from day one. Moreover, I bought into the story from both sides that if you were any good then you would get rapid promotion and substantial bonuses. I backed myself in that I thought that I was capable of doing well so I went with what I thought was more fun.

What I didn’t have was anyone who could tell me that, while that may be true, if I really cared mostly about money then I should go into banking. You would work just as hard but the rewards were much larger much faster. In consulting you could get bonuses in the first five years or so that were a significant fraction of your base salary. That’s amazing by any measure but it’s very different from being able to get bonuses that were multiples of your base salary.

To be fair, if I stuck out to become a partner in consulting (which you could do by your early thirties) then I could have got into the significant six figure, or even seven figure, brackets. But, again, the journey to those numbers were likely to take longer than in banking.

You are such a banker

So, the second thing I would tell my younger self would be to think again about his choice of career. Looking back, if I had wanted to make silly money quickly I should have gone into banking. If I did that and kept my feet on the ground, as Sam at Financial Samurai did, I could have got out with a paid off home and a comfortable stash in my early/mid thirties (my comfortable FI level).

I think the thing that irritates me about my choice is that I think that the work in banking can be as, if not more, interesting than consultancy. Yes the early years involve a lot of spreadsheets. But if you go into investment banking the whole M&A game is fun.  If you go into managing the right types of funds then you get to sit on the boards of companies and tell (not just advise) management what to do. To be clear I’m not commenting on the morality of doing these things. I’m just saying that for someone like me it’s at least as interesting as being a strategy consultant – and a lot better paid.

The burden of privilege

It may seem from this that I didn’t enjoy my time as a consultant. That’s far from the truth. Certainly there were things about it that I disliked – not least that, in a bitter twist, I spent a huge amount of time hunched over spreadsheets. But, overall, it delivered on its promises.

I spent months working in various European cities. I presented to multiple company boards. Actually. I was pretty decent at it so I did get the promised rapid promotions and decent bonuses. It taught me how to walk into companies of all types, gain the trust of people. I know how break down problems to make rational decisions. Unlike a lot of people, including most CEOs I met, I learnt what a business strategy was and how to develop one. I also learned how to manage people, time and resources.

My time as a consultant was well paid, interesting and it taught me a lot. All of this happened in my early to mid-twenties. I’m very conscious that I was (and am) very privileged and that in many ways consultancy is a dream job. My gripe and advice isn’t even a response to first world problems, it’s a response to a first world elite problem.

But, the nature of this challenge is to advise my younger self so there it is. That’s what I would have told him. Work harder and consider a different career.

Postscript

It’s been fascinating answer to this question. I’ve always half thought this but writing it down has made me think it through. The challenge to write as a stream of consciousness reminded me of Paris which I haven’t thought about for many years. I’m delighted to reacquaint myself with that young man.

Thank you Savings Ninja!

Further reading

This post is in response to Saving Ninja’s excellent monthly challenge.

If you want to see how others reacted to this challenge I’ll add them in here as they come in.

Saving Ninja

in-deed-a-bly

Ms ZiYou

EarlyRetirement

Caveman

Othalafehu

SteelKitten

Young FI Guy

Dr FIRE

Inspiring Life Design

theFIREstarter