Moving capital

I met a hedge fund manager today. Ex-senior partner of a major investment bank. I got to learn about his origins and about life in the world of capital flow. He confirmed for me that a lot of people in the industry cared far more for experience and rewards than for the impact they were making on the world. When he spoke, whether it was about the difficulties that he'd had in his own life or about the reclusive superstars of the industry, it was with a animated, yet dispassionate, voice. The industry's titans, he confirmed, carried themselves with an amazing sense of superiority...one that, as he put it, "told you that if you were talking with them, it was because they were gracing you with that privilege."

He was remarkably open about his own life, peppering his answers with laughs that seemed mechanical, but not totally fake...as if they were now a learned tool that he used in his conversations rather than a natural expression of emotion. I wonder if his environment had simply demanded that he learn that skill, like a soldier who adjusts his body to continue fighting despite his wounds.

He admitted that he was super competitive, and hated to lose--traits I don't share...not on the same level, anyway. I heard there are some people that are physically pained by the act of losing; I'm merely disheartened. Perhaps I should have done more individual sports.

He'd had a hard life, emotionally. His story sounded somewhat like Richard Feynman's, minus the good father. He laughed through most of his statements, and admitted that after wrestling with his past for 15 years, it had lost its affect on him--now, it was simply something that had happened.

I asked him about what he was working towards. Nothing, he explained. His elaboration spoke of public offerings, and acquisitions, and opportunities to scoop up distressed assets, and the lingering specter of class war and torched Lamborghinis as the economy worsened. His next week's work would continue wealth-generating efforts that had about a 2 year timeline. He spoke of his work as if it was something that was just there...something that he'd learned long ago to treat as a form of sustenance, a daily bread in its own right.

He'd started working when he was 14, and by the time he was my present age, he'd been rich enough to retire luxuriously. As he put it, he soon came to his senses and got back into the game. One thing that stuck out was how often he used the word "lucky" during the course of his narrative. His language was still that of money, filled with impressive sums and financial jargon and brand names and fast cars, but amidst his rapid, legato phrasings, there was a sense of self-awareness that made him different from the power-driven high-rollers I'd met in the past. And, with the same measured smile, he affirmed that many of the people in the industry really didn't like themselves. I didn't know how to interpret his answer...to some degree, he was calling them out for their errs, but he was neither dissociating himself from them nor lumping himself into his assessment, either.

He understood Warren Buffett's capitalism, and Andrew Carnegie's gospel of wealth; they were the two people he raised when I asked him to speak of people in the industry who actually had his respect. But it was peculiar how he seemed somewhere in between the realm of those men and the moderns that he was describing--he knew the pitfalls of treating human beings as "social security numbers with capital amounts associated with them", but also admitted that he lived in the world of numbers, and that though what he was doing had a huge impact on people's livelihoods, on entire companies' survival, his day-to-day didn't really make that product of his work too tangible to him. He could continue onwards without it.

While listening to me wrestle with my desire to have great impact and still see the fruits of my work on a tangible level, a friend of mine asked me, rhetorically, whether chairing the Federal Reserve would be a position of great impact. It is, of course, and though its work cannot be easily mapped to the ordinary man's life, nor could one deny that actual lives and families depend on its decisions, as well.

But what if the very traits and histories that make you good at those kinds of jobs also require that you stop thinking about their actual impact on people?

...Ender has already explored this ground; I need add nothing more. I still don't know what moving capital will look like...but this is not it. And perhaps I need to stop using the language of finance to describe what I really want to do. It's inadequate.