IB folks, are you surviving or thriving?

It will be some time as an analyst soon. When I look back, the impressions I had before joining are starkly different than the retrospective perspective I have now.

So much of my work is routine: I make IMs about an interesting industry that I would forget after a few months. After all, most IMs are the same format. The jargon changes but the bullshit remains the same.

ECM and DCM dominate deal flow with the few M&A deals divided amongst the analyst pool. Even in this, the model is often made by the client with us adding a valuation section and beautifying it.

My 1-3 am nights are spent making sure periods are aligned and sense-checking comps.

While calculating WACCs, I'm not calculating project specific WACCs like I was taught in school. I'm just optimizing the WACC to get the valuation my MD wants. Heck, I feel I was stronger technically while preparing for interviews than now, when the rust has settled in.

Often times, I feel like I'm just surviving...while my heart and soul want to thrive.

Despite the drudgery, an investment bank is a goldmine of resources. Initiating coverage reports and unique models that others have worked on are just an email away. Uniquely structure termsheets are just a folder away on the company drive. Market updates are a bedrock of the mandatory 20 emails you get when you refresh Blackberry Work in the morning.

And yet, despite knowing that learning and mastering these surfeit of resources are the way to thrive, to feel like you're in control, 1-3 am nights day after day make it very difficult to spend that extra 1 or 2 hours to master something completely unrelated to your current deal. When you spend 80-90 hours from Monday to Friday, you just want to sleep on the half-day you have off in the weekend. It becomes difficult to thrive when you're surviving.

For those that are thriving in IB rather than just surviving, how did you do it? What was your process to balance true, deep learning with the routine aspects of the job?