If I were applying for a job in the finance industry, this is what I’d write:
Let’s be honest for a moment—you interview ten thousand people a year and are incredibly bored by the monotony of it all. You don’t understand finance, but you do understand that it’s safest for you to choose candidates according to the guidelines in your employee handbook: Degree in Finance—check; 3.5 GPA—Check; two years as glorified personal assistant at financial supermarket—check.
Sifting through cookie-cutter candidate after cookie-cutter candidate makes your job, not to mention, your business model, stale.
You wouldn’t have hired Steve Jobs (no college degree); Richard Branson (not polished enough) or Warren Buffet (no tolerance for mathematical alchemy). You use the word never too much: Blacks will never vote, neither will women, and a Catholic can never be president. Kings will always rule men, and men (never a woman) will always rule kingdoms. And, oh yea: real estate values can never go down.
Here’s the never you need to understand: A commitment to monotony has never pushed the human race forward; revolutionary ideas were never fueled by risk-aversion, and memorizing facts has never been a substitute for vision. We all know that thinking inside the box has never been the secret to success. Innovation drives results; passion drives performance, relentless persistence wins the game.
In business, either you have it or you don’t. It: The inability to be stopped; unforgiving vision; the passionate pursuit of perfection; an unyielding desire to change the game; to be the best; to make it work at any cost; to see the issues with a lucidity your adversaries only dream about. Try finding these things listed on a resume.
Any moron can regurgitate the latest theorems from his economics textbook, but those theories will soon be displaced by newer, similarly meaningless theories, in the book’s next edition. Your model was stale before you lost billions of dollars in profits—now it’s downright nauseating. Those expertly picked employees who lost you billions of dollars where just following the theories prescribed by their textbooks, which stated that real estate prices never go down. I guess the mathematical genius whom came up with that algorithm wasn’t blessed with common sense.
As he wrote his symphonies, Beethoven annotated his music: In the margins of his sheet music he mockingly wrote, “Theory will not allow.” Theories of his day prohibited his musical combinations, just as theories of the church had prohibited the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun and experts predicted that television would never work because it required too much focus from the audience (while the radio allowed for multitasking). These same people told us that eMail would never catch on (we already have a postal system); and since the day’s of Daedalus, human’s could not fly: I guess no one told the Wright Brothers, and Boeing certainly missed that memo.
See what you don’t get is that vision can’t be taught in school; that great ideas are born of a restless will that refuses to accept things as they are; that some of us know that we can do it better; that some of us realize that the world as we know it today was shaped by men with the will to translate their vision into reality; to transform imagination into creation; men who adhered to the simple three syllable creed upon which complex problems and the word never dissolve: I’ll do it.
