Advice on knowing you're the worst

Uh 2 months is still pretty early, you’ve got time, but it’s a major uphill battle. First impressions can be hard to shake and perhaps more importantly your confidence has gotten rattled, which has snowballing effects. Here’s what I think after doing this for a few years:

First, as someone above mentioned, figure out where you are lacking and work to improve it. I would argue analysts generally are behind the curve for a few reasons:

1. You are actually not smart enough (rare, but I have worked with people who just couldn’t keep up)
2. You keep making careless errors (fixable broadly, but your current team might hold the grudge forever)
3. You are afraid to ask questions/ learn new things for fear of looking stupid and this snowballs to the point where you are petrified anytime a deliverable is assigned to you, so you continue to not do tasks. (Actually very common when people start out, you can fix this, you just need to change your mentality. Also, this might not be your fault you were just assigned very poor managers who aren’t great at helping you ramp.

So, if it’s number 1, I would leave the industry. That said, imposter syndrome is real and banking really isn’t rocket science, so I would argue it’s probably not that you are stupid. Also, I know kids who went from being music/ art majors who ended up top analysts, so prior preparation isn’t your problem. You might have a confidence problem though, which can be even worse. Also, being told you suck can make you feel less and less confident and competent everyday which ultimately makes this job not worth it IMO. Decide why you care about this job and want to improve. If you don’t have a reason for doing it, don’t do the job.

If it’s 2 (you keep making mistakes), it’s not a natural skill you are bad at, you just are being disorganized. You need to make a check list of errors and things to review before sending out a deliverable and go through that list every time before you send. I promise if you literally check off “footnotes have periods” you will have footnotes that periods. Also, if you are listening to music as you work, stop doing that, and slow the hell down. Also, before sending a deliverable close your eyes and spend 10 minutes in silence doing nothing then review it again. You might have never sat in silence your entire life, but this (mediation) can help immensely for reorienting your ability to spot errors. Also, unless you have a meeting in 10 minutes, no one will care if you spend 10 minutes to respond to something—that’s basically a long dump and a hallway chats amount of time. What sucks about making errors early, is people don’t trust you to take on larger responsibility then. I would recommend trying to have a heart to heart with individuals on your team on how you can work to improve and show them some concrete steps you are taking to be less error prone. Unfortunately here is the vicious cycle that happens with this job: 1) analyst/ intern makes errors 2) senior analyst/ associate checks for errors and finds them 3) analyst/intern sends a new deliverable 4) senior analyst/ associate looks extra hard at the deliverable because the last one had errors. Now the flip side, if you get things right, people basically stop checking your work because they trust you to have their back and as a result less errors are found with your work since no one checks it.

So now we get to 3, which sucks a lot. I’m betting it is a bit of all these, but 3 is the one that is the hardest mentally to deal with. First off, a truth: bankers are pretty horrid managers. Acknowledge you are likely being mismanaged and it is not your fault and comparing yourself to other analysts who might be in better situations isn’t fair. Just as an example, I had an analyst early in my career who refused to answer questions I asked when I was an intern. After having had many rounds of interns and analysts under me, I now know that’s just an abusive manager. When I have people that report to me today, I make it very clear that they should always come to me for questions and the dumber they are early, the quicker they will ramp and help me relax, while I can watch them do my job and make me look good :D. 
 

Either way, good manager or bad manager here is what I would do:

1) Find a buddy or another smart analyst in your class and just ask them all the really really dumb questions you are afraid to ask. No joke, I had one kid ask me how to do expenses after a year of working. Just rip the bandaid off and be stupid in front of one of your fellow analysts or someone you don’t directly work with—it’s really not a big deal especially if you haven’t don’t something before. If you feel afraid to ask a question on how to do something you haven’t done before you are going to have a really hard time in life.

2) start separating out your mistakes into 2 buckets:

• This was actually my fault/ I knew better and was careless 
• I wouldn’t have known to do this until I made the mistake 

People will make you feel bad for both, but mentally you shouldn’t feel like you see screwing up if you learned from an error that doesn’t happen again. In fact, I would argue that is almost the best thing you can do early on when you start.

I was typing this on my phone while commuting, but listen, keep your head up. You aren’t writing your entire job history in the first 2 months. Everyone is useless during that time. You and your class still have a ton of wood to chop!