How long

Hey, I am a high school student done with applications and was wondering after reading through a lot of this forum (which I have heard is skewed more to people my age and college students) about the insane time commitment to IB, and how people like to exit to other opportunities like PE/HF etc that also have insane time commitments (I am quite limited in my knowledge but I know there are a lot more similar jobs). What I was wondering, is how long in this field do you have to hack it or continue at these 80+ hour work week jobs before it gets better? Or does it never get better until you choose to leave to a different job for that sole purpose and when are people typically able to do that? I'm not averse to working hard; however, I am apprehensive to these insane hours if they would extend throughout the entirety of my career. Thank you

 

This is a bar. Sounds like you’ve awoken before the rest of us, kid. Either hop on the tech train or do ur 2 years and leave to corp dev. Better hours, wlb, etc

 
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This is all part of what we say prestige is. A large part of it working in high finance is the genuine ability to not need any "free time" or "hobbies" for enjoyment or relaxation, but rather an actual real desire/passion to do nothing but work and work and work in an environment and profession that is cognitively demanding and requires high stress tolerance and conscientiousness and exceptionally long hours. To these guys working is their "hobby" and what they would do during their "free time" even if they were not paid for it. They love work and work is their life. There is this saying that those who can live and be happy with the most minimum possible of what we normally call pleasures - women, alcohol, need for friends, girlfriends, emotion, love, festive celebrations, family, games, movies, sleep, need for money - are the strongest and most powerful to the extent that they also possess those other traits like raw intelligence and conscientiousness and stress tolerance mentioned above. They have little need for huge amounts of wealth because they simply have so few needs other than a desire to work that they have nothing to spend on. They must of course still want to dedicate a healthy amount of resources to dressing well and certain luxury dress items and carry themselves well because to dress and act like a wealthy Jack Ma is not virtuous or prestigious. And it is important to note that this ability to do with only the minimum must be legitimate and cannot be faked for whatever reasons. These guys with the genuine ability think they are super-humans above everyone else in the world, and operate on levels higher than everyone else. Average people, an abnormal obsession with material possessions like luxury goods and cars, stupid uneducated celebrities like Amber Heard, and people who chase only money and women and those material possessions to flex (instead of actual high level cognitively demanding pursuits like MF PE, being an F50 CEO, physics, philosophy, literature, [hallmarks of a real educated person who pursues what Aristotelians call higher pleasures] rocket science, and being a "master controller of the universe") like Andrew Tate, are too "below" them on every level to take seriously. A way I think about this is: how would someone like Michael Corleone from The Godfather or Itachi Uchiha from Naruto think about someone like Andrew Tate if they knew him?

 

When I talk to students who wanna go into IB I have the urge to tell them to run like their life depends on it and to go into tech/engineering. I think it's easy to be a high school/college student (who quite frankly posses little perspective on life) and say that you'd be okay choosing a career where you're working 60-80 hours a week, but once you're actually in it, it's pretty depressing. Maybe I am lazy, but I don't think it's unreasonable to not wanna work long hours doing a stressful job.

 

You're in high school, which means you're young and the sky's the limit. Don't pigeonhole yourself in any one path and explore all your options. You have so much flexibility, take advantage of it. Maybe IB is for you. Maybe it isn't. It's a good career but it's not all it's cracked up to be.

 

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