Quarter Life Crisis

Assuming she lives till 100, today would be the quarter life mark of my wonderful girlfriend, Cindy. Although at quarter life, she is a perfect example of someone who is not suffering from a quarter life crisis. Unlike many of us who are in the world of finance, engineering, consulting, law, medicine, etc - she chose the path of something she grew up doing and realized she had a passion for upon applying for college in high school - performing and teaching the piano. Equally considerable to following her dreams, she has parents who are encouraging, supportive and open to her pursuing a non-conventional career. How awesome is that, Asian parents not forcing you to major in business, science or engineering. Not to say that her path has been easy - she’s done quite a bit of soul searching, keyboard pounding, and exploration herself to find the niche within the broad field of piano that she’s best suited for. Notice that the energy and frustration has been focused in the field of piano. She did something she likes and now shes beaming all that energy into it. Instead, those of us suffering from the quarter life crisis are obsessing over how we don’t really like what we’re doing and what we might like doing better and as a result, dilute our focus from succeeding in this profession. Cindy’s approach (might I add that she is also an avid practitioner of the Death-Ground Strategy) is how you stay focused and get ahead in your career - but, yeah, it all starts out with picking the right career and having the freedom and support to do so early in life. Or else, you sort of have no choice but to just make lemonade from the lemons that you are equipped with. Not to say you can’t make a career change later in life, it’s just that you’ll need to be able to tolerate and accept the fact that you’re going to be quite a bit behind the curve.

Ah, what a perfect trio - talent, work ethic and supportive parents. Happy birthday, Cindy! If you’re interested in learning the piano, read her blog here.

Now for me, back to due diligence on the small business lending and secondary markets scoring analytics and intermediation industry……. hooray(?).

There are tons of rankings out there. This is just one of them.

“Harvard University and Stanford University — two schools that typically rank low despite reputations for academic excellence — again were criticized for what recruiters said were their students’ inflated egos and excessive expectations. Nevertheless, their graduates still end up landing some of the highest paying jobs.”
Rankings (pdf)
Article

Source: The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive annual survey of corporate recruiters