John’s Story

Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 7:54 am

John Alexander, a forty-four-year-old British investment banker, decided to put aside his skepticism when a friend urged him to go see an astrologer. He expected a generic prognosis. To his surprise, the first thing she said to him was, “I’m glad I haven’t been you for the last two or three years. You have been undergoing a painful internal tug-of-war between two opposing factions. One side wants stability, economic well-being, and social status, and the other craves artistic expression, maybe as a writer or an impresario. You may wish to believe that there can be reconciliation between these two. I tell you, there cannot be.”

Around his fortieth birthday, John had given himself two years to devise a way out of a successful but unsatisfying career in the City, London’s financial district.

In fact, it took me five years. I think when you’re going for a complete change, it takes longer than you guess. All I knew to begin with was that I didn’t like being a banker. There is something rather empty about finance. It’s glossy. It’s interesting. Sometimes, there are really good moments. And clearly you’re well paid. But most bankers do not feel, at the heart of it, that they’re doing something worthwhile. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable as my role shifted from being a client’s trusted adviser to being a salesman pushing the deal. I hated having to admit at a party that I was an investment banker. I would go to intense lengths to try to avoid it.

To tell the truth, I never felt comfortable in my own skin in the City. I was recruited to banking out of the foreign service, where over lunch you might talk about archeology or butterflies or Chinese ceramics—we were conversant in a whole range of subjects. I remember the first day I went to the Buren’s canteen. All people could talk about, in some form or another, was money. In fifteen years, I never went back.

But the reason I wanted out, really, was much more fundamental. I just believed that if I stayed there until, say, age fifty-five, and then put my feet up for five years and then at age sixty looked back on what I’d done, I would not feel that I had made the most of my one unrepeatable life. So I decided I had to get out.

At first I went through the fairly routine areas former bankers enter: How about something like venture capital? Could I get a fund together? Could I form a team to buy some company, improve it, then sell it? I concluded that that was just the same thing dressed in different clothes. I would just be deferring a problem, not solving it, and it would not get easier to solve. I urgently felt the need to change sooner rather than later.

But I utterly rejected the thought of looking for just any new job. I had figured out by then that I didn’t want to be part of an organization, that I’d come to dislike everything that went with a big one—not the work per se, but the interminable meetings, the constant e-mail junk, and all the other busywork. Another thing that put me off it was the increasingly political nature of those places. One year, you can be the guy that everybody wants to have on every committee, your star is on the rise, and then six months later, nobody wants to say hello. I’m not a political animal, and I didn’t want to try to become one.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career