Work ethic or intelligence what is more important for a career in finance ?
Hey Monkeys.
In your opinion what is more important to have a successful career in finance your work ethic (will to succeed) or your natural intelligence. and why ?
Cheers.
Being liked by people. Seriously.
But one needs a combination of work ethic and smarts and a lot of luck to "succeed" in this industry.
If you put a gun to my head and said choose one, I'd say work ethic/drive. Most of finance is not rocket science by any means and there are plenty of not smart clowns in high high places.
Work ethic is going to trump most everything - it can make up, especially in finance, for a lack of natural or innate intelligence. There's a limit, obviously, to this but generally speaking I think it's more important.
The key is to have enough self awareness to overcome your weaknesses and leverage your strengths - ideally guiding your career path to double down on the strengths.
A lot of people are talking about being liked, your EQ, social skills, network, etc. - those are all extremely important but you won't, or at least it's rare, to be able to even use those without building out a work ethic and skills. Also... many of those 'soft skills' are not simply handed down from god. I know it's popular to dismiss those nowadays but presenting something in a coherent, concise and engaging way that doesn't come off as cheesy, salesy or irrelevant is extremely challenging.
The same with managing relationships or building your network. That's hard work - it takes a lot of effort and time to do. Sure, it's not quantum mechanics but you should try spending a week on the road going to conferences, events, networking hours... it's really draining. That's where work ethic really separates many people.
It’s like asking which organ is more important to living, lungs or heart. Both are requirements to be successful in finance. However, it seems like this thread is seriously discounting intelligence, which I think is wrong
I’ve seen a lot of banking analysts who try to be the hardest working, but there are serious diminishing returns after 14-16 hours a day of working. Everyone in finance is working really hard and wants to get ahead - how do you differentiate yourself? Intelligence is being underrated on this thread because, while there’s limited brain power required at the analyst level, it becomes a pretty strong differentiator at the VP+ level. Getting really good results for clients is about delivering insight, executing flawlessly, and negotiating really great deals - all of which is helped by intelligence. For PE, it matters very little how many hours you spend thoroughly diligencing every company out there if you can’t develop a differentiated view based on expertise and insight, and intelligence is pretty important for that as well. Among my business school classmates, the correlation between intelligence (at least, my perception based on being classmates) and successful PE recruiting was very high.
The analyst experience is about who can survive working 100+ hours per week, but that is not what drives success long-term.
Intelligence is a broad term. I know some people who were great students with awesome GPAs from target schools but were terrible analysts even though they were the hardest workers (worked the longest hours) and asked to leave after their first year. Were they intelligent? In undergrad, they definitely were but what happened to them? I think we need to consider efficiency/street smarts as another factor or maybe a facet of intelligence that is really important in IB. These analysts were not very efficient and didn't have the proper common sense to get what needed to be done done in the right amount of time or complete things in the appropriate way as their associate or above expected them to.