When to Jump by Mike Lewis

Author:Mike Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

MICHAEL LEWIS

Finance Professional to Bestselling Author

I TELL MY seven-year-old all the time: “Allow yourself to be lucky.” When I was his age, I used to think, “I’m so lucky that if I just look around, I can find money on the ground.” And I often did. Because grown-ups drop it everywhere. It’s in seats, on the sidewalk, everywhere. It’s amazing what you can find if you’re looking for it. Sometimes I’ll tell my son, “Let’s just go find valuable stuff.” And you wouldn’t believe what we find. All you have to do is keep yourself in a frame of mind to be open to what’s dealt to you.

To back up a bit, I grew up in New Orleans. There was not much of an orientation toward careers, certainly not for kids, and I didn’t start thinking about college until I was in my junior year of high school. At that time, my ambitions amounted to getting up every morning, going to school, playing baseball, and when I graduated, going to Princeton. Nothing beyond that. I thought that once I got in I was done, that I didn’t have to do anything else, so I didn’t think much about what happened after.

I majored in art history because I liked it. There weren’t really career tracks at Princeton. I mean, if you wanted to be an engineer, you majored in engineering. And there was premed, of course. Neither of those interested me. So the only implicit career choice I made was not following all the people who majored in economics because it could possibly get you a job on Wall Street.

Junior year, I started getting involved in my thesis composition. Princeton’s senior thesis is a really big deal. Your whole senior year is basically organized around it, and it’s a book. I think mine was forty thousand, maybe fifty thousand words. It was 130 pages, and it took forever. But the writing of it was what changed everything for me. I loved it. It transported me. I thought, “This is what I want to do.”

At first, I thought that meant I wanted to be an art historian. But my thesis advisor told me that was crazy. There wouldn’t be any jobs. Told me flat out that I just shouldn’t do it. So it took me a little while, but I realized that what I wanted to do was write books. Actually, to be specific: I wanted to write senior theses.

But I didn’t dive into writing full-time. I remember thinking that too many writers don’t ever do anything else, so I should go have lots of adventures that would give me material. My first adventure was in finance, starting with a pass/fail class my senior year in the econ department that interested me enough to get a master’s in economics. While getting my master’s, I was at a dinner party sitting next to these women whose husbands ran Salomon Brothers International. I got along quite well with one of the women, and she made her husband hire me after the dinner.

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