What are the craziest most eccentric hobbies you do, or have heard someone else do. I'm not talking about stamp collecting or picking up pebbles to shove up your ass, but actually interesting things that would make your interviewer instantly hooked on what you are saying.
Have any of you got a job from just mentioning a crazy hobby you do, or just being super relatable to the guy grilling you across the table. I'm just saying, if you are a shark wrestler, you would be instantly hired by me...
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Of all the things I have heard or seen, the most respectable 'craziest' thing to do on the street is to climb Everest. I have known a few people to attempt it, but part of the journey is just putting down a large amount of cash and that is fairly well known on the street as well. If you climbed Everest, you probably put down $60-$100K in fees, training, airfare, sherpas and what not.
You never want your hobbies that are 'crazy' to appear reckless. So Everest is perfect for this. It is calculated, you prepare for it, it is something not everyone can do. It is a bit crazy and you are risking your life. It is a serious venture. A lifetime accomplishment.
The only thing crazier than that - that is acceptable on the street is decorated combat veterans / spec ops veterans. These guys have the real stories, but the real badasses won't say a word.
I was friends with this dude that attempted Everest. He got close. Based on his stories and the talks about him in certain investor circles, he had a massive first round of funding come in for his new business. He killed it. Started some other companies too. But, the main thing that investors knew about him was that he was willing to go the extra mile. And that really counts. Investors want their money back first of all and things like this let them know damn well that when they pick up the phone, he was going to either have a plan or be working on a solution to get where the company needed to be.
The guy that sits next to me grew up in Ghana and did Spec Ops for the US. Behind enemy lines dropping from planes at night kinda stuff. He doesn't really talk about it much. Badass.
How do you know if the guy is not completely making this up?
Your motivation for expanding your horizons are questionable. But I did get my last job after talking about compound bow archery with the CFO for 30 minutes. He's a big bowhunter. The job was shit. But that's a big contributing factor to why I got it.
Chicks who have a bad relationship with their father.
Playing polo
I think investment bankers in general are not the adventurous types. If most of all, we are very risk-averse and we are good at gaming the system. Maybe traders but definitely not investment bankers. Most people are either into 1) golf, 2) MMA / BJJ or some sort of martial arts, 3) cycling, 4) weight lifting, or 5) triathlon - seen a few chess players but have never seen anything out there. But then, would you hire someone who has extreme hobbies for work? Imagine your associate wearing a sky diving gear and jumping right out of your office window?
Forgot to add: mentoring random people on WSO, meeting them in real life and getting them full time jobs in investment banks. Very lucky that I haven't met any crazy people from WSO.
I train BJJ, it's an amazing workout and overall great martial art to learn.
Yes until someone tear up your ACL in your knees or dislocate your spinal back disks. :P
Hunting in Alaska
Risking my life savings a few times a year with some people I met on the internet.
I met someone who was in to Falconry once. Can't imagine that not being one of the more interesting hobbies out there.
Court Tennis or Real Tennis if your from England. Not necessarily crazy but there aren't many players in the world.
Auto erotic asphyxiation
In the same line of thinking: freediving (like scuba but without the air tanks)
Says something about your ability to act calmly under stress when you're 100-150 ft down under with nothing but the air in your lungs.
One of the coolest hobbies I have known someone to have was gunsmithing. The dude made beautiful black powder rifles.
I was a professional gamer (Call of Duty, Hearthstone) for a while. Does that count? lol definitely made some good money for a HS/College kid.
Similar background. Where did the money come from? Youtube/Streaming or partnerships?
Tournaments. My old teammate is top 5 all-time earnings now in CoD.
Diving with sharks, down hill mountain biking and occasional unprotected sex with strangers.
I have two: one I put on my resume and one I don't.
The first, which 80% of interviewers ask about, is a solo bicycle ride I did when I was in high school that covered 1,700 miles in 22 days. Most people are genuinely curious how I was able to pull that off at such a young age.
The second, which I don't include on my resume, is shoemaking. I'm talking buying raw leather, cutting it up, stitching it together, and eventually having a product good enough to wear. I've made about 12 pairs, all leather, around half of which are boots and the remainder more experimental shoes I've made. I just picked it up reading articles and watching videos online. I don't include it because I haven't made a pair in a while so consider it somewhat stale. I hope someday to make a pair of dress shoes nice enough to wear to work, but that is a different style of shoemaking from that of boots.
The shoe-making is pretty interesting and I think is a dying art. As a fan of goodyear welted shoes I can appreciate the amount of work that goes in to making a pair of shoes. How much does it take to create a pair of shoes? How many hours would you say you spend making a pair?
This is what gets me with Wall Street. I totally get your feeling. The bike riding is your standard go-to Wall Street answer and discussion point. But truth be told, your shoe-making hobby is actually 10x more bad ass in my book and I know nothing about shoes.
I enjoy free dive spearfishing. I can hold my breath for over four a half minutes, have gone to depths of over 100 feet, participated in tournaments, and have fought off sharks numerous times.
Did free dive spearfishing once and came face to face with fairly large white tip shark. I shit bricks and never did it again. I dont mind regular scuba diving with any kind of sharks, but there is something about hunting in their territory that scares me.
Yep. Sharks are generally not a threat to you, unless of course you’re holding a flailing bloody fish. Then they get quite “excited”.
Every day spending hours on watching memes instead of working
I think that’s the majority of people tbh
Rapping and producing. I make lo-fi hip-hop music with a pretty small following. Not really that crazy but people act like it is when I tell them.
Can you link without blowing your anonymity?
Surfing. Not a big glorious ego trip like walking up Everest or whatever, but it come with its own risks. Plus it’s an actual hobby that you can do on a regular basis if you live near the ocean. And it’s cheap.
Since becoming an EB intern, I’ve become somewhat of a cocaine connoisseur. I have a guy who gets coke off the dark web and we get it straight from the source so we know which cartel it comes from, what processes were used to refine it, etc.
People act like coke is a hard drug but it’s so common on Wall Street. And back in the day people didn’t even know it was bad. Seigfried and Roy used to give it to people as gifts
Lmao
"Crazy hobby"=overrated and stupid. Passion for a hobby is more normal. Anything you're passionate about you get good at. Anything you get good at looks "crazy" to outsiders.
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