Bankers vs. Lawyers

It's a trick question, monkeys. Neither of you create value in this society: you're not creating any new inventions, penning new ways of thinking, starting companies/businesses, or new technology/processes to create societal wealth. Both bankers and lawyers work eerily long hours to do mundane, mechanical tasks that require little to no intellectual firepower. Why do you think w’ere all called monkeys? Banking and law are what young, high-achieving graduates do because the have no idea what to do with their lives. Think about it — the reason you went into banking or law is probably so you can have as many options as possible, exactly how you put together a bewilderingly diverse resumé of extracurriculars in high school to get access to as many elite colleges as possible. You're simply playing that game of hedging your bets for your long-term career yet again, except during college this time. But but here's the catch:

Being in banking or law doesn't give you any special talent or value at all. You don't become an asset to anyone. Why? Because you don't have a real skill like programming, writing, or something that translates into creating new ideas, wealth, or improving business processes. You don't have a talent that say, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Larry Page might have had. All you learn is how to build models, create pitchbooks, prepare materials, and get the higher-ups coffee. You don’t have any real talent here. You just don't know how to create new, exciting things, and you'll never learn it in banking or law, to be quite frank.

The job of bankers is to restructure and play around with wealth (aka companies) that's already been created by thought leaders and entrepreneurs (which, by the way, will be exponentially richer than any MD at a BB or Partner at a white-shoe). The job of lawyers is to resolve disputes over old things, intervene in and structure peoples' affairs, and cover others asses through arcane legal loopholes. None of these jobs bring new ideas and wealth to society, and neither do the skillsets you're equipped with have ANY CONTEXT OR RELEVANCE OUTSIDE OF WALL STREET. You really think that as an ex-banker/lawyer, you'll know how to operationally add value to a company later on when you exit? You've never started/ran a company before or stepped foot into real operations. You do grunt work for a living. Stop kidding yourself.

This is exactly why the US went from one of the greatest innovators of the world during 1950-80 to China's bitch nowadays as the Chinese innovate us away. From 1950-1980s, we were dreaming big! We went to the moon, created Silicon Valley and Moore's Law, and our increased productivity drove an industrial revolution with new technology.

Enter high finance in the 1980s. Wall Street eclipses engineering as the way to approach the future. Americans stopped looking at technology as the primary way of moving the world forward and started looking at finance. Wall Street boomed and everybody moved over to it. Instead of taking real personal risks to build the future, they put their money in “safe” things like investments. But what were they going to do with that money from investments? Build new things? Donate to charities? Improve education? Nah...just invest it more and make more money! All until you die a cold death with a fat trust fund sitting for your kids and an unhappy family, only for the cycle to repeat and repeat, that money never being realized into true wealth for society.

At the end of the day, finance and law are the only ways to make money when you have absolutely no idea how to build real wealth. Bright college graduates head to Wall Street hoping to stumble upon a great path: what could be a better reward after years of resume-building than an “elite,” process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”? By contrast, a true boss — a wealth builder (think entrepreneur, scientist, author or innovator) — determines the best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly for prestige and to keep options open, he strives to be great at something substantiative, making him an asset, and allowing him to own assets that will always create new wealth for him over time: majority ownership of a cash-flow generating company, royalties to a publication/academic work, etc.

Let me just put it simply — do you want to just sit in the corner and watch from a distance as someone else fucks that hot chick, or do you want to be the one doing the real fucking, the real boss business of starting new companies? Answer that, and you’ll have a better idea of what’s next for you monkeys.