[On Career] An Encounter with My Future Self[关于事业] 遇见未来的自己

On the bus to the Hong Kong airport a while back I sat down next to a well rounded man in his forties who wore comfortable jeans and a black nylon jacket. He was wearing a Yankees cap, so I naturally began talking to him. His deep rumbling voice hinted at a man of authority. It turned out he majored in finance, too, in his younger days when he was at university. After ten years in the brokerage arm of large investment banks (brokers act as the middleman between large investors and financial markets), he was now an exporter out of China. After talking to him I can’t help but wonder whether I was sitting next to my future self, returned to the past to give me advice.

When I told him I too was a finance major, we got to talking about MBA’s. He was against the MBA in his case purely because it just didn’t make economic sense. He was offered an opportunity at Smith & Barney Co. (now part of Morgan Stanley) and completed a fully paid MBA program from one of the top schools. The MBA would only slightly increase his pay, but it would help him move into the investment banking arm (where large commissions can be earned on big deals). However, he would be tied down an additional three years to the company afterwards, something he did not see as particularly appealing.

“Anyway I felt like the king, had everything I wanted,” he said. He paused, “but the work got tiring. One day my boss tore me to pieces for breaking his dark-suit standard at a meeting. He went off his rocker.”

“I didn’t even know the pressure on me until I quit,” he said, “like the weight had been lifted.”

Now he was exporting electronic chips made from Dongguan, a large high tech special concession zone in Southern China.

“We make 15 times the cost, instead of 16 times like we did five years ago,” He said. Not bad margins. “Anyway, I’ll do it for another ten years, add a few more houses (to his sizeable collection), then retire and travel the world.” He added, “My best friend is still in the business, he’s so stressed out he’ll barely make it past 50.”

I thought for a while how sometimes life puts people in your path at critical junctions. I was still mulling over my decision to leave my own brokerage job as the bus sped past Hong Kong’s ubiquitous advertisements before it gave way to the red steel supports of its large containment docks. I’m not sure whether his words helped me or not, it is still too soon to say, but it gave me a perspective, a possibility into a kind of future life.