Starting Your Career
Starting Your Career
So here you are: final diploma in hand. It’s been a long road. You’re older and further in debt than you ever imagined you’d be at this point. You wouldn’t mind if you never again saw another textbook or timed exam. But, looking back, you have some unexpectedly fond memories. You can see how much you’ve learned. And there are some people you’re really going to miss.
Now, though, it’s time to get to work, real work. There are school debts to pay, career ladders to climb, and service to render. You may already have a family to feed.
The choice of your first job out of school is an important one. Just as choosing a school and then a major were among the biggest HSJs of your life to that point, choosing your first job is a very high-stakes decision. There are lots of factors to consider: how much it pays, how much time you’ll spend at work, whether there is heavy travel involved, how much upward potential the job offers.
In addition to those things, which are all important, you might want to add two others that may not be so obvious. In the long run, these two things could turn out to be the most important factors in your decision. One is how much you can learn. The other is whom you’ll be working with.
More Learning
Learning won’t naturally be the kind of conscious activity at work that it was back in school. But someday you’ll look back and realize that you learned more in your first job than at any other time of your life. That’s because it’s in this first job that you’ll start to put together everything you’ve learned since you were a child. And doing that will require you to develop your HSJ skills like never before.
For example, your first job out of school will confront you with gaps in your knowledge that you didn’t know were there. No matter how careful you were as the general contractor of your education, you’ll find there are some essential things you just don’t know. With luck, you won’t embarrass yourself the way I did with my “discovery” that assets always equal liabilities plus net worth. But you’ll be surprised by the number of times your boss uses terms you’ve never heard before. You’ll casually write them down and then hustle back to your desk. With the help of websites, coworkers, and maybe even former professors, you’ll find out what those terms mean. You’ll work hard to fill your knowledge gaps. It will be a great exercise in using and building your analysis skills.
You’ll also find that succeeding at work requires much more collaboration with other people than school did. No matter how smart and hardworking you are, you can’t get anything important done in the professional world without the help of others. And, being at the bottom of the organizational totem pole, you won’t be able to rely on formal authority; rather than commanding people to help you, you’ll have to convince them. It will be difficult at first, but your people skills will grow by leaps and bounds as you learn to really work with others.
Your first full-time job will also require increased moral sense. You’ll face “office politics” in a way you never did at school. People will sometimes try to undercut you, and you will be tempted to return the favor. You may even be asked by bosses or customers to do things that border on the unethical. You won’t always know what to do.
You’ll also have to make tough judgments about your work-life balance. Are you going to work late nights and weekends to get ahead? Will you take that promotion even if it means moving your family to a new city? Your ability to make moral judgments will be put to the test as never before.
A Job Designed for Learning
With all of this new learning you’ll have to do, you’ll be glad if you’ve chosen a job in which learning is an explicit objective, something that everyone recognizes as part of the job. Other things being equal, you’d like to work for an employer who sees your personal development as a long-term investment. In that kind of first job there will be formal training offered. For example, you might be organized into a “cohort,” in which you can learn with other new employees. You’ll probably have an assigned mentor. You might even experience planned job rotation that allows you to see the organization from many angles.
Such learning opportunities are worth their weight in gold. In fact, they’re even worth taking a lower salary, if you have to. More than making a lot of money, your primary goal in your first job should be learning.
One of my mentors, Elder Robert D. Hales, applied that principle in his first job after graduating from the Harvard Business School in 1960. He did well in school and had many good job offers at graduation. Several of the companies who offered to hire him were among the largest and most prestigious in the world. They had hired many Harvard MBA graduates, but they especially wanted young Robert for his outstanding product marketing and advertising skills.
Robert also had an offer from a much smaller company called Gillette, which made shaving razors. Gillette wasn’t used to hiring topflight MBAs. Their senior executives had all started at the bottom of the company and worked their way up. They were the number-one maker of razors in the U.S. But they were less prestigious than the other companies recruiting Robert, and they weren’t willing to pay as much.
Robert, though, saw a potential opportunity in working for Gillette. Rather than immediately making him a marketing and advertising executive, as the other companies planned to do, the leaders at Gillette wanted Robert to learn all aspects of their business. He recognized in this offer the opportunity to acquire what his business school mentor George Doriot called the “sense of operation,” or an understanding of how all the parts of an organization work together. Even though it meant a lower salary and less prestige, Robert went to work at Gillette, with the goal of learning everything he could. He took assignments to work in the company’s factories. He did a stint in the finance department. He even made sales calls to supermarkets and drugstores.
Robert’s roll-up-your-sleeves attitude caught the attention of the company’s president, who began to give him special assignments. One was to go to a small town in Connecticut where people were buying a new razor made by a British sword company. Robert went door-to-door asking people if they were buying this new razor and why they liked it better than Gillette’s. They told him that the British razor had stainless steel blades that maintained a sharp, smooth edge longer; this meant that they could use them longer without cutting themselves. Robert bought one of the British razors and took it back to the company president. The president asked him to come up with a competing product.
Because of his rotation through the lower ranks of the company, Robert knew everyone he needed to enlist. He and his colleagues quickly came up with a new razor with stainless steel blades; their design was even better than the British razor’s. It was a great success, and so was Robert. He received one promotion after another. Within just a few years, he was president of one of Gillette’s largest divisions. By then he was better compensated than many of his former business school colleagues who went to work for the larger, more prestigious companies. He rose quickly because he focused more on learning than on climbing the organizational ladder.
Choosing People
In addition to putting a priority on learning in your work, you’ll want to do the same with people. It turns out that job satisfaction depends more than you might think on how much you like the people you’re working with.
I was lucky to sense that when I was interviewing for my first job following graduate school. After 1987’s Black Monday destroyed my prospects for investment banking, I decided to try business consulting. With recommendations from several kind mentors, I was able to secure interviews with two consulting firms in Boston. On a freezing Friday morning in January I interviewed with four members of the bigger and better known of those firms. The interviewers were all kind. But the environment felt formal. The conference room in which I was interviewed was very fancy, with lots of marble and hardwood.
That afternoon I went to a smaller consulting firm called Monitor Company. Monitor had been started just five years earlier. For such an upstart company it enjoyed a surprisingly good reputation, but not one to rival the bigger firm I’d seen in the morning.
The Monitor interviews were different. Instead of a fancy conference room, I was taken to the office of a senior consultant that was free because he was out of town. The three consultants who came to interview me were friendly and informal. They seemed curious about my personal interests, not just my qualifications for the job.
In between interviews I had time to look around the office. It had a homey look. I could tell that the occupant, a man named Joe Fuller, as I later learned, was hardworking and well-read. But he wasn’t a professional housekeeper.
I could also tell that Joe had a sense of humor. There were all kinds of strange memorabilia on the desk and bookshelves. Coffee cups with different companies’ names (consulting clients, I correctly guessed). Machinery parts and model cars and tractors (more client stuff). A three-headed plastic dragon with a gold medallion around one of its necks (I couldn’t figure out what that was).
There were also lots of photos. Joe was apparently married to a beautiful brunette. And he seemed to have a very close relationship with a fellow that I later learned was his brother, Mark Fuller, Monitor’s founder.
The longer I sat in his office, the more I thought I would like Joe, as I did the three interviewers. Then, toward the end of the last interview, I started to smell popcorn. Joe’s office was right next to the company kitchen, and Friday afternoons were an informal party time. The smell of the popcorn—and the kindness of the people who shared it with me—convinced me that I’d found my first employer.
It turned out to be a very good decision. In the years that followed, Mark and Joe taught me the art of management consulting. More important, they became lifelong friends. The interviewers from the other consulting firm likely would have been good colleagues too. But I probably wouldn’t have had similar mentoring experiences in that much larger organization. I’m glad I followed my nose and chose people over prestige.
The Power of Mentoring
You’ve noticed by now that I’m grateful for the influence of many great mentors. There are tens of billions of differences (most of them dollars) between Warren Buffett and me. One thing we have in common, though, is good mentoring. Mr. Buffett learned how to invest in companies from a Columbia University finance professor, Benjamin Graham, for whom he went to work after graduating. Professor Graham had learned his investment lessons the hard way, losing his fortune in the stock market crash that preceded the Great Depression. Mr. Buffett gives his mentor great credit for his own phenomenal success as an investor.[1]
You’ll find similar mentors behind most successful people. For George Washington, one of those mentors was his half-brother Lawrence, who guided him in his studies and inspired him to pursue military service.[2] Another was a man named Thomas Fairfax, a wealthy landowner who was impressed by the sixteen-year-old Washington’s potential and employed him as a surveyor.[3] With a deceased father and no formal education, Washington relied heavily on the training and example of his mentors.
You should try to find such mentors, especially early in your schooling and professional work. They can teach you things that can’t be learned from reading books. They can also help you see your weaknesses and show you how to turn them into strengths.
Cultivating Mentors
Your first inclination in choosing a mentor may be to seek out the most successful people you know. In fact, you’re likely to think of the most successful people you’ve heard of and start scheming about a way to meet them. But a mentor, like a letter-of-recommendation writer, should be a person with whom you have natural association. You’ll benefit most from someone you spend a lot of time with.
You also need to remember that mentors can’t be hired like tennis coaches or piano teachers. They’re not in the habit of selling their time. And they’re busy people; they can’t take you on as a community service project. They won’t give you a lot of time unless there’s some mutual benefit for them as well as you. That’s why you should look for a mentor in a place you might not naturally consider. The best mentor, believe it or not, could be—get ready for it—your boss.
All right, you’re entitled to a groan. Getting more feedback from your boss probably isn’t your idea of the perfect mentoring experience. But think about it. You have to spend time with your boss, and he or she has to spend time with you. And you’re both serving the same organization. It’s likely that you didn’t actually choose to work with one another. But consider how much you could benefit from a mentoring relationship with your boss. He or she has probably been where you are now and was successful enough to get promoted. Now your boss is watching you in a position he or she used to occupy. That means your boss knows things that could benefit you not just in getting your job done but in learning how to do it better and qualify for more responsibility.
The key to turning your boss into a mentor was taught to me by another of my mentors, Elder William R. Walker. I reported to him in Japan, where I was supervising 120 missionaries. One day, in a training meeting with a group of these missionaries, he shared a list of principles that had helped him in his very successful management career. One of them in particular stood out in my mind: “Make your boss’s agenda your agenda.”
“Time-out,” you say. “I’m not going to be just my boss’s yes-man. That’s not good for anybody—my boss, me, or the organization. I was hired to think, and when I disagree with my boss, he or she needs to know about it.”
Good for you. You’ve developed a solid moral sense. But you’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion about what Elder Walker meant. In fact, I did the same thing at the time. When I first heard the statement, “Make your boss’s agenda your agenda,” I immediately imagined an employee telling the boss only what he or she wanted to hear, or trying to make the boss look good, just for the sake of scoring points.
Since then, though, I’ve thought a lot about the times when I’ve succeeded in my work. Whenever that happened, my boss and I had a common vision. I was excited about the assignments he or she gave me. I wanted to perform them well, not just to please my boss but to help the organization. When we disagreed, I shared my opinion. But if we couldn’t find common ground, I trusted my boss’s judgment enough do things his or her way.
Making my boss’s agenda my agenda didn’t mean that I simply did what I was told. As a young consultant, I learned to apply this maxim: “Listen, execute, and add.” A good junior consultant, I found, made sure that he or she understood and followed through on the specific instructions given. But the great junior consultants, the ones who got promoted quickly, didn’t stop there. Having listened and executed on the initial direction, these consultants then added ideas of their own, things that the person giving the assignment hadn’t thought of. By listening and executing every time, they never gave their bosses nasty surprises. But, by adding to what was expected, they often produced pleasant surprises.
Now, there are bad bosses. It may be hard to find a mentor in a boss whose skills and work ethic you can’t respect. And you certainly don’t want to adopt the agenda of a boss who is intentionally hurting the organization. But if you’ve chosen the right workplace, based more on the quality of the people than on salary or prestige, you’re not likely to have to tolerate a really bad boss for long. Most of the time, when you’re humble enough to see the strengths in your boss and overlook the shortcomings, you’ll find in him or her a valuable mentor and even a friend. Your boss’s help can make a great difference as you make important career decisions.
In fact, your bosses, like your college and graduate school professors, will form the core of your career “network.” You’ve probably heard about the importance of networking; you may even believe the saying, “It’s not what you know but who you know that counts.” Well, personal connections are indeed valuable to your career progress. But think about it: How much do you trust someone to get a job done for you if you know nothing about that person’s capabilities or track record? No matter how effectively you network, any potential employer or client worth working for will arrange to talk to the people who have firsthand knowledge of what you can do—specifically, your former bosses and professors. (This is the same principle we explored when talking about graduate school recommendation letters.) Building a broad network of contacts will mean little if you can’t get good references from the people able to vouch for what you know. That’s one more reason to treat your boss like a mentor.
Getting on Top of the Water
For all the good things mentors can do for you, there are certain crucial career decisions that only you can make. One of those is how much of your life to give to your job. It was one thing to pull all-nighters and work weekends in college or graduate school. You knew that those sacrifices wouldn’t last forever, and that your performance during that relatively brief time would affect the rest of your life. So you gave it everything you had, even if it meant giving up fun and time with friends and family.
Now that you’re in your first job, though, you’ve got to decide whether to continue at that same breakneck pace. It certainly isn’t sustainable for your whole life; you don’t want to become a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge, with plenty of career success but no hobbies or loved ones. The question now, as it will be throughout your career, is how to strike the right balance. That is an ongoing high-stakes judgment requiring good analysis and people skills and great moral sense.
A metaphor may help put this question in perspective. A career, I suggest, is like a wakeboarding run. If you haven’t tried wakeboarding yourself or seen someone do it, you can still imagine it. Envision yourself up to your neck in cold water, with a life jacket riding up on your chin and ears. You’re fighting to keep your head above the water, surprised at how the buoyancy of the wakeboard is lifting your feet and causing your head to sink back. You’re also fighting the urge to shiver, both from cold and from a bit of fear. It’s definitely a moment you don’t want to have last for very long.
On the other hand, you’re not that thrilled about what comes next. You’re clutching the handle of a fifty-foot rope. The other end is connected to a tower on a powerful boat, one designed to make a high, sharp wake. The boat’s motor is idling, and the driver is looking back, waiting for you to yell, “Hit it!”
When you give this signal, the driver will engage the engine and one of two things will happen. Ideally, you’ll draw your knees toward your chest as the water pressure on the board builds. The pressure will cause the board to rise, and you’ll stay on top of it in a carefully balanced crouch. At the same time, you’ll begin to bring forward the foot you’ve chosen to lead with. Within a few seconds you’ll be standing tall, enjoying the view from the middle of the boat’s broad wake.
Of course, you know the other thing that can happen: You can wipe out. There are many ways this can happen. You could lean back too hard, creating a tug of war between you and the boat. The boat will win in the end. When you finally let go, you’ll be left with aching hands, strained shoulder muscles, and water up your nose.
You could also lean forward too quickly. This will cause the board to sink underneath you. For one millisecond you’ll be standing knee-deep in the water. Then, in the next millisecond, you’ll be pulled forward into a face-plant. This won’t be so hard on your hands and shoulders, but you’ll probably still get water in your nose.
There are lots of other ways to wipe out. Almost nobody gets up on the first try. But most people finally get the hang of it. With patient practice and good coaching from the driver, you’ll ultimately succeed.
There is, however, something that could make success impossible. If the driver of the boat accelerates either too quickly or too slowly, even the most athletic would-be wakeboarder will be in trouble. If the boat’s speed is too low, there won’t be enough pressure on the wakeboard to make it rise and break the plane of the water. You know what that means; it will be like leaning back too far. You’ll be dragged like a submarine until fatigue makes it impossible for you to hold on any longer. That’s lots of soreness and water in the nose.
You can also imagine what will happen if the driver hits it too hard. The board won’t plane fast enough to keep up with the boat. Even if you’re an amateur bodybuilder and can hang on, you’ll have the experience you did when you leaned forward too fast. You’ll end up in a face-plant. The rope will be yanked out of your hands, and you’ll be left with another snootful of water.
Overdoing and Underdoing It
Now, the point of all this isn’t to turn you off to wakeboarding. It really is a great sport. The reason we’ve explored the right and wrong ways to get up on a wakeboard is because of a principle important to your career. The principle is this: In starting a career, as in starting a wakeboarding run, you want a good steady “pull” that will get you up quickly. If the pull from your first job is too strong, you’ll burn out and crash. If, on the other hand, the pull is too weak, you could spend your entire career dragging through jobs that provide too little opportunity to grow, as well as too little money to live comfortably on.
You can imagine the kinds of first jobs that would pull too much. They’re the ones that your superachieving classmates will go after, the prestigious jobs that offer eye-popping salaries. You may be tempted to take one of these jobs yourself. “I’ve been working seventy hours a week in school and making nothing,” you think. “How bad could it be to work seventy hours a week and make a fortune?”
Look hard, though, at the differences between student and career life. When you were a student, your schedule was predictable. Your commute to school was short. You studied at home a lot. And you never had to travel. You also enjoyed built-in social experiences because your “co-workers” were also your friends; you hung out on weekends with the same people you studied with during the week.
Most of those things will change, though, when you take that first job. You’ll spend hours commuting to work and flying to distant cities. Your mail will pile up at home; so will your family obligations. You’ll lose touch with your friends from school, and you’ll have to work hard just to get to know your neighbors. You’ll find that seventy hours of work as a student is nothing compared to seventy hours of work as a professional.
You’ll make more than just personal lifestyle sacrifices in this kind of job. There’s likely to be more emphasis on immediate job performance than on learning. The people are likely to be more self-centered, and mentors may be harder to find. Your long-term plan for developing HSJ skills could be compromised. Your hard-pull job, which you thought would get you up quickly, could leave you burned out and unhappy.
There are different but similarly serious risks in taking a first job that provides too little pull. You might decide, having burned yourself out in school, that you are entitled to a forty-hour work week in a job that never intrudes on your personal life. Such jobs can be found, especially by people as smart and well educated as you. You may even discover that the salary is enough to live on.
But you need to double click on this apparently attractive lifestyle. For one thing, that initially adequate salary will start to shrink, or at least it will seem that way. The clock will start to run on your student loans; you’ll have to start paying them back. You’ll decide that a family of four can’t get by on a single car. Kids will need braces, and so on. Your expenses will grow, but your salary may not keep pace, leaving you feeling pinched financially.
You’ll also find that the learning opportunities aren’t as great as you’d hoped. High-stakes judgments don’t confine themselves to the 8-to-5 workday. For that reason, people who want to make them can’t always limit their professional commitment to forty hours a week. The best bosses and mentors will have learned to strike a balance between work and personal life, but they’ll make sacrifices when necessary. And they’ll expect the same of those they mentor. Leaders of that caliber may understand your decision to strictly limit your professional commitment, but they won’t view you as worthy of their mentoring investment. You could find yourself dragging through a lifetime of jobs that never lift you beyond the HSJ opportunities of this first one, which provided too little pull.
A Good Steady Pull
The best initial job is probably somewhere between these two extremes. You’ll find an employer who sees your long-term HSJ potential and is willing to invest in it. The hours may be longer than you’d like, though not as bad as in school. You’ll travel a bit, but the trips will be worth the sacrifice of time at home because of the things you learn and the people you meet. Your commute will seem at first like a complete waste of time; you’ll learn, though, to fill it with productive things such as mentally planning your day or listening to audio books.
The pay at this job won’t put you at the top of the heap among your fellow graduates. However, it will be enough that you won’t have to commit yourself to an overly tight budget or spend too much time worrying about money. You’ll find that your boss isn’t perfect, but that he or she knows a lot and is willing to invest time in you. Important projects will sometimes require staying late at the office or working over the weekend at home. The things you learn, though, will feel worth the price. You’ll notice your HSJ skills steadily growing, and your boss will start to talk optimistically about your future.
If you have children, you probably won’t live as close to their grandparents as the grandparents would like. However, you’ll be making enough to take an annual trip to visit them (instead of going to Hawaii or the Caribbean, as you might prefer). You’ll have time for church on Sunday and will be able to give full measure to your calling as well as be a great home or visiting teacher. You might even sign up as an assistant soccer coach. Your unpredictable obligations at work may make you feel like the flaky coach who can’t be counted on for every game. But you’ll have a sense of sustainable balance and happiness.
The “Surface Tension” of Learning
As your career progresses, you’ll start to notice something. You’ll find that making HSJs gets easier as you go. Your analysis skills, already strong thanks to college and graduate school, will get sharper as you focus them on the issues specific to your profession. Likewise, your people skills will blossom as you learn from your mentors and spend most of each day working with colleagues to get things done. Your moral sense will also grow, particularly as you assume leadership responsibility over other people; as you make decisions affecting their livelihoods and lives you’ll learn to balance the demands of economic justice and individual mercy.
In fact, as experience increases your HSJ capacity, you may start to feel like a confident wakeboarder. Once you are on top of the water and the boat is moving quickly, you realize that the water feels solid, almost as supportive as dry ground. And the pull from the rope seems to have dropped to almost nothing. You go for ten minutes without exerting the effort you did in two seconds of pull-up. It is an unexpected but confidence-boosting feeling.
The reason the water feels so solid is because it has something called “surface tension.” Each water molecule is electrically charged in a way that draws it to other water molecules. This force is weak, just barely enough to support a paper clip carefully placed on the water’s surface. However, if an object such as a wakeboard is moving rapidly across the water, the surface will bear a great weight. To the wakeboarder traveling twenty miles per hour, the water feels like firm ground.
The learning you acquire through higher education and challenging employment has that same property. Your HSJs skills, once you’re on top of them, will hold firm. In fact, the more of these skills you have, the easier it is to add to them. That’s why you want to get them early in your career, just as a wakeboarder wants to get up at the beginning of a run rather than the end. In both wakeboarding and work, life is much better once you’re “up.”
HSJs That Pay in Different Ways
Now, the wakeboarder who’s gotten up has some options. He or she can pull outside the wake and, by cutting back across it, can “get air.” With a little practice the wakeboarder can get “big air” and jump from one side of the wake to the other. With yet more practice, and a bit more speed, he or she can try midair flips and rolls. There’s no end to the creative possibilities as the wakeboarder becomes more confident and skilled.
Solid HSJ skills form the same kind of foundation for your career. If you choose, you can take on more and more responsibility, until you’re making decisions that affect thousands of people. Your high-stakes judgments could win you fortune and maybe even fame. That’s part of the vision that started us down the road to higher education and has finally brought us here, where you have great HSJ skills at your disposal.
But there are other options for you now, just as there are for the wakeboarder. Instead of going after “big air” HSJ opportunities and the big salaries and high public profile they afford, you could choose a less aggressive career path. You could stay in the organization where you’ve established yourself as a valued player, but not seek every possible promotion, letting someone else assume the high pressures and high salary of the CEO slot. You could continue to build your HSJ skills and make great contributions in your employment. But, with the support of the skills you’ve acquired, you could do that without the kind of personal sacrifice you had to make in order to get established at the beginning of your career. You might have time, for example, to move up from assistant soccer coach to head coach.
You could even do something more extreme. Wakeboarders know that, once they’re up, the boat can slow a lot before the board breaks the surface of the water and they fall back in. In other words, the strength of the pull required to get up is much greater than the pull required just to stay up.
There’s a career analogy in that. Your early acquisition of HSJ skills opens the door to career options that otherwise might have been closed or might have required great financial sacrifice. For example, you could move out of the big city where you got your first job. Your established HSJ skills might allow you to find rewarding employment in smaller markets with fewer high-paying jobs. You could move closer to the kinds of outdoor recreation activities you like, or settle closer to those grandparents who want to spend more time with their grandchildren.
You could also take a job that pays less but has great intangible rewards, such as teaching. When you were younger you may have dreamed of being a high school teacher but abandoned the dream when you learned how little public school teachers are paid. The good news is that your pursuit of HSJ skills in school and work might allow you to reconsider this dream and others like it. You may have earned a graduate degree that will give you the option not only to teach but also to work as a school administrator. If you’ve been careful to pay down your debts and save a little money, you’ll be better able to live on a teacher’s salary. You may even be able to augment that salary with consulting work during the summer. In other words, your career “boat” could slow but you could still stay on top of the water.
On top of those advantages, the HSJ training itself will make you a better teacher. There are no more important HSJs than the ones you’ll face in teaching and similar service jobs such as counseling and coaching. These service professionals can, like parents, mold lives. Through their high-stakes judgments they can change the world, one person at a time. Unfortunately, not all of these professionals are well-rewarded financially for those HSJs. But they are paid in different currency, most notably the gratitude of those they serve.
Your HSJ skills will open a world of fulfilling possibilities. You’ll find that you can not only provide the necessities of life for those you love but also find deep meaning in your work as you serve others and continue to learn. Education makes this possible. Whatever your career objectives and your personal capabilities and interests, you need to be a lifetime “student.” That means both formal schooling and also lifelong learning. Remember, you’re a child of God, destined to become as He is and to do the things He does. His work involves the greatest of all high-stakes judgments. You have that same potential, and formal education will help you realize it.
[1] Benjamin Graham’s influence on Warren Buffet is described by Alice Schroeder in The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam, 2008), 139–50, 177–89.
[2] James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Back Bay Books, 1994), 5.
[3] Ibid., 6.