3. FLOW
There was a time when work was beautiful. It was in my early days as a banking associate, before I had earned a single promotion or heard the sweet words of affirmation from friends and colleagues. It was before I felt the heaviness of success, when I was free and the world seemed large and inviting. Beautiful, however, does not mean perfect. It has, instead, to do with an overriding sense of rightness about the work to which you have given yourself, come what may. Because when work is beautiful, it is unmistakably connected to something deep within you, the very essence of you, and it is from that inviolable place where every imagined failure, every feeling of inadequacy, every unrelenting critical voice loses its potency once and for all. There was a time when this was true for me.
Although it was over twenty years ago now, I remember quite vividly the very first day I stepped onto the equity research floor of Hambrecht & Quist, a small but up-and-coming investment bank headquartered in San Francisco’s financial district. It was the late 1990s, when the first dot-coms were beginning to boom and a harvest of IPOs would shortly be reaped, creating a windfall for tech-focused banks the likes of H&Q. On that bright morning, I was ushered into the office of my new boss, a senior in the department who followed the semiconductor industry for the firm. For years any hope of meeting a Wall Street analyst, much less working for one, was quite dim. I nearly abandoned it. And now here was one right before me, incarnate.
“I was there because more than anything else, I wanted my life to matter.”
As I sat down in a chair opposite his desk my pulse quickened. I leaned forward, eager to listen as he finished up with a phone call. The conversation was similar to one you would hear on a financial news network, full of business speak and tech acronyms, perfectly boring to most people, but to me it was like a song. There was an artistry, strange as it may sound, to the manner in which he responded adeptly, almost effortlessly, to every question that came from the other end of the line. Sitting there, with only a mahogany desk separating us, it felt at once as if an eternity stood between us and yet there was some mysterious, unnameable connection between us that registered deep within me too. I had no words for it at the time, but I can say now that I saw something of my future in him and in that moment.
After his conversation, we exchanged pleasantries and walked out of his office into an open area in the center of the research floor where fifteen or so desks were arranged in rows. Each desk was occupied by a twenty-something seated in front of a computer screen flashing red and green with changing stock prices. He patted me on the shoulder as we arrived at an empty spot. “This is the bullpen, where all the associates sit,” he said. “It’s your new home.” I took my seat, swiveled around and saw young people, like me, hard at work, some with one ear on the phone while typing earnestly, others silent and focused with noses buried in binders and books and prospectuses.
I wondered what brought each of them there. Did they want what I did? I was there because more than anything else I wanted my life to matter. Would they help or hurt me? I was acutely aware that I did not have the requisite Ivy League or Stanford pedigree to work in investment banking. I had come instead from San Jose State and hustled my way into the job, or so I thought. This internalized a sort of reflexive defensiveness in which I saw my colleagues first as competition, as if we were all playing a zero-sum game in which another’s success would mean my failure. And yet I had an unshakeable sense that I belonged there with them, that I would be okay, more than okay; that I could stand in there and fight if I needed to and survive. I had gotten there on my own accord hadn’t I?
As those first months wore on and the 80-, 90-, 100-hour work weeks blurred into a kind of soupy fog, so too did my imagined inadequacies fade into a tolerable background noise. The work itself enlivened me. If it is possible that something as earthly and quotidian as spreadsheets could be a doorway to the spiritual realm, I must have walked through it a thousand times in those early days. There was a sense that in giving myself to the work that it too, in some unfathomable way, was giving itself to me. As I lost myself in a holy mess of prospectuses and stock charts and investment reports, I was somehow being opened up to find something of my soul in them — a greater sense of self, a hidden, creative force, a freedom I had not previously known. My whole world was alive with the symphony of it all. Could God have been there?
There is a common notion, and a romantic one, that this kind of experience is only for artists and dreamers, not for people like me who stared at a computer screen for a living under the subtle tyranny of florescent lights and mandatory meetings and dress codes. Yet with every hour I spent at my desk struggling to learning the trade there was an ineffable sense of my being led to a wellspring within that allowed me to express something of myself in the work that I only vaguely knew. Often, after long hours of work, I would look at a financial model that finally came together, not quite certain how it had, and marvel at its elegance and precision, how it conveyed a kind of strange beauty, and a Voice would say to me. You created this and it is good.
The irony of describing Wall Street work with such a high gloss is not lost on me but there was a rightness about it all in those days. I knew that what I was doing was feeding the world in some way that I could not directly see, that it had meaning beyond my limited existence. This was a magical time I’ve spent years replaying in my mind, trying to recapture something of its innocence. I once believed that this was merely a product of ambition, but now I can see that there was, in fact, a stronger pull within me, a deeply human one, the force of which I have only now come to reckon with. It had to do with the primal need to use my gifts and talents for what I believed in, to consent to an unquestioned loyalty to what was so personal, so intimate to my being, that I couldn’t possibly imagine not giving it everything I had.
There was a moment in those early days when everything seemed to come together for me, a moment which on the surface was inconsequential yet revealed to me something utterly profound, something I could never manufacture. I was asked to speak on the “morning call,” when analysts update the firm’s traders and sales people on any important changes to ratings or forecasts on companies they follow. These calls occurred an hour before the stock market opened, beginning the flow of information that H&Q’s clients, mainly large institutions like mutual funds, would use to base their investment decisions each day. Speaking on the call was a big deal precisely because associates were generally not invited to be on it. An associate proving themselves to be analyst material, however, would be asked to contribute something short and straightforward with a low risk that anything would be blurted out incorrectly.
“Instead I found myself sliding down a slippery slope of imagined failure. Was I to be an analyst or not?”
I was to talk briefly about a change in one of our company’s financial models. In essence, it did not amount to much and was hardly worth consideration at all and yet when I was asked — only minutes before the meeting was to begin — a streak of white-hot terror shot through me. It was one thing to tinker with spreadsheets in the solitude of my bullpen cocoon, believing they were good, and an entirely other one to talk about them under the bright lights of the morning call, to be questioned about them by people who would take what I did out into the world.
I imagined myself standing in the conference room before the firm’s seniors, stumbling through my spiel, a pitiful jumble of nerves and incompetence, my crackling voice broadcasted throughout our trading floor and into our regional sales offices. I began to question if I knew the model well enough to talk about it all and searched for a plausible way out of what felt sure to be a career-limiting moment. Then the sting of guilt arose. I should have been thanking the stars for an opportunity to show everyone what I could do, grateful for the stage on which to shine. Instead I found myself sliding down a slippery slope of imagined failure. Was I to be an analyst or not?
I pushed the bad feelings away and hastily shuffled some notes together. When I arrived in the conference room, short of breath from anxiety, I sat down in a spot reserved for speakers on the call. I felt as if the entire room was gathered there to stare at me. I looked around sheepishly and found many faces glancing in my direction. Some were smiling, although I was unclear whether these were a professional courtesy, plastic kind of smile or reflected a genuine interest in my being there.
As I awaited my turn, a strange amalgam of emotion began to form inside me, as if I was simultaneously in control but absolutely out of control; as if my fate was at once all my own and completely and utterly not my own. The room began to sway and I breathed in deeply to calm myself, but it seemed of no use. My limbs went cold. I felt as if I should run.
When I was called on, I rose from my chair and walked weak-kneed to a podium in the front of the room. There was a heavy silence and the weight of what felt like a million eyes evaluating me. I tried to convey the appearance of confidence by tapping my notes against the podium, as if I was ready to seize the moment, but underneath the steady demeanor I trembled. Then, just as I was about to speak, something mysteriously opened up deep inside me — my soul. I felt something like a warm embrace holding me inside and out, steadying me. An urging swelled into every cell of my being to trust myself and in whatever the moment may bring.
I looked out at the room and the eyes set upon me now seemed to welcome me. Then I opened my mouth. One word followed another. They were the right words, words I did not know I had, words that surfaced in me like a heavenly stream from an unknown place within. And as I spoke, my God, it was as if a sliver of eternity broke into that room and enveloped me, so that I felt the past and the present and the future converge, arresting every last uncertainty that dared linger inside me. And for once there were no more questions about who I was or what I was to do. There was only gratitude and knowing.
I knew that I was to be there, in that room at that moment. Whatever was happening now was ordained eons ago. I knew in some unfathomable way that all the untold hours I spent preparing myself for a such a moment were orchestrated precisely to bring me to that very moment. I felt at one with those words I spoke and with the room and everyone in it. Then there was the cool rush of calm and the floor set firm beneath my feet. The whole thing seemed to lift me up and take me to another place.
So I flew.
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“Dance beautifully in the box that you are comfortable in.”
— Kobe Bryant