An Infinity of No.

After a few months now of trolling WSO and four weeks of writing in the contributing blogger intern program, all while working full-time for a F500 and pursuing my MBA full-time in effort to break into ER, I have had a bit of an epiphany about myself and a truth that an old friend tried to hammer into me many years ago has finally sunken in. Without further ado, I'd like to share a bit of that story and how it is reshaping my resolve to keep running into an unending barrage of "No," punctuated by the always-pleasant overuse of idiomatic expressions.

Big Fish, Tiny Pond.

I grew up in a town of about 30,000 people. My parents were college drop outs who had gotten pregnant too soon with my brother. My mom stayed home and my dad worked a shitty job that couldn't pay the bills--I only learned much later in life that the pink and yellow slips of paper my mom took with us to the grocery store were Uncle Sam's way of feeding my family. My parents and brother lived for a couple years in a double wide trailer until they lucked into a starter home by means of just taking over this old lady's payments (i.e. she gave them all her equity in the house). It was a modest home in a troubled neighborhood (drug addicts, white trash lazy people, and immigrants just starting out).

I don't share this to seek pity or sympathy or whatever--that was my reality and I'm totally cool with that, it just sets the stage for the rest of my story.

Additionally, the next thing I am going to say is not bragging and I don't take any personal pride or credit for this, but again it's just the way it is. I was born abnormally intelligent, which is additionally odd because the rest of my family is ... well, not (okay, I supposedly had a genius aunt, but she died when I was tiny so I can't confirm that). My mom's side is a bunch of backwards rednecks and my dad's side was basically your typically lower middle class, hard-working non-intellectual types. I knew very early on that I was more intelligent than my parents, my brother, my classmates in primary school, the teachers, administrators, and almost everyone with whom I had personal contact.

Totally full of myself, I screwed off in class and still blew tests out of the water, I got courted by Duke when I was in the sixth grade, I was counselled numerous times to skip grades, despite being the youngest kid in my class already, etc. etc.

None of these early events in my life are to my credit--in fact I am actually ashamed of all of this because I was such an ungrateful, lazy prick in light of the amazing brain that I just happened to be born with. Nevertheless, I became accustomed to a level of "success" that wasn't difficult or solid--because it wasn't really success, requiring basically nothing of me. I got a better ACT scores than 95% of the country when I was still in 10th grade without studying and was accepted into a merit based academic magnet school in 11th grade.

Until I made it to my first year of college, my life was a series of undisputed successes (at least on paper).

No Pain, No Gain.

Many people don't realize just how detrimental "success" without effort is to long-term character development and personal growth. For this reason, I personally no longer define success by external metrics, but defer to the Greek method where success is judged only by improvement and competing against oneself and ones preconceived notions of what they can do (also adopted into many sports such as running, weight training, and Iron Man, among others).

Anyway, my lazy outtake on life developed during my first 17 years of floating by on natural intellect set me up for a huge cataclysm. I graduated high school with a slightly above average GPA with some 26 hours worth of college credit from A.P. courses, a phenomenal ACT score, and a chip on my shoulder the size of a mastiff. I thumbed my nose at all of the colleges in my state (despite the opportunity for a full-tuition, room, board, and stipend scholarship at the University of Arkansas which was less than 5 minutes from where I grew up--I know... big mistake).

I believed I was too good to go to college in Arkansas. Instead, with no thought to what I wanted to do with my life, I enrolled in a 40k+/year private military college on a half tuition scholarship, assuming with how amazing I was, I would be able to convince the USMC to pay for the rest. I hadn't done much research, and didn't know what I was talking about, but hey, who wouldn't want to give ME money, right? Wrong. I (now) have infinite respect for the US Marine Corps and the fact that they value determination, integrity, and hard work above your natural born mental processors.

Back to Square One.

The USMC basically told me to fuck off.

Apparently they had met their quota for narcissists and self-important know-it-all's for the century--and it didn't help that I also had asthma, a fact that I had assumed, for me, they would merrily overlook. Having never dealt with any kind of rejection or failure before, I did what came most natural and moved on. I didn't think twice. It wasn't long until I was rationalizing it away as their loss and that I was simply too good for the military anyway. I bounced around with a variety of majors, not really caring about anything, until I finally found that I kind of enjoyed theology.

On a whim, after a counselor asked me if I'd ever considered becoming a vocational minister, I transferred to a Christian college and finished my undergraduate education with a degree in Biblical Studies. I deceived myself at the time to believe that there was a higher purpose and that I was being lead into it, but in hindsight, I now believe that it was my ego-centrism simply mutating into self-righteousness. Anyway, I went on to do about 18 months in Seminary at Moody Bible Institute, paying my way by working odd jobs and eventually landing at an F500 in consumer and small business sales.

Have We Been Here Before?

Once again bored and feeling mired to a destiny that didn't fit my inflated self-image, I quit Seminary and decided to go to business school and work in MBB strategy consulting or Investment Banking. Hey--with my great track record of never seeing anything through until the end, who could say no to me? I took a spot at Kelley School of Business in their online program (see my Q&A on the topic). When I finally decided on equity research and began the banking recruiting process, the subtle failures of the past five years that I'd ignored, passed over, rationalized, or blamed on others all came back full force and knocked the breath out of me. I was totally unequipped to handle the perpetual vulnerability of networking and applying and pushing for something with no guarantee of getting in.

But herein lies one of the most valuable truths I have ever learned.

Refined by Fire.

I'll spare you the quotes and allegories, fables and wives tales that normally accompany the claim that all things worth having must be gained through trials and tribulations, but that's the gist of what I'm talking about.

Several years ago, a very close older mentor told me that I would never know success until I had failed. I never realized just how perceptive my friend was until I was staring at my computer screen early one morning looking at yet another "we're not interested" email from a BB.

I actually really appreciated the email--the simple courtesy of telling someone no goes miles when 100 other applications and emails and networking requests go unanswered. But what struck me is that I found myself slipping back into my "so what, I can do something else" attitude of my undisciplined youth. I stopped myself and went for a run. I had finally found the one thing that I wanted to do with the rest of my life and I was about to give up on it as easy as one might pass on a muffin offered by the barista at Starbucks.

Enough was enough.

I had grown tired of mediocrity and having nothing to show for my life that meant anything to me. So I resolved to push harder. And it still didn't work. So I'm pushing harder. And when that doesn't work, I'll push even harder. It may take 18 months, it may take 18 years, I may never make it, but now I know that I will never give up on my pursuit to break into Wall Street. I may not specifically end up in ER, I'm open to other sub-fields, but I will push until breaking in or breaking dirt.
And simply that knowledge that I'm in this for the long-haul and that the efforts, growth and personal improvements in and of themselves are the true measure success is all the encouragement I need.

I hope my little story might offer support to anyone out there who feels faced with a perpetuity of "No."