This dude has a brilliant quote on everything!

Like most kids I hated doing any kind of work during my childhood. I considered it futile to waste my physical effort on anything other than sports. While working on anything, a part of my attention was always occupied on thinking about what sport to play next. I think I had what they now call ADHD. ADHD wasn't that famous then. So when any kind of work was allotted to me, I would either avoid it or do it for the sake of doing it. My part of reasoning used to be that if I do it badly, I won’t be asked to do it again. Unfortunately this habit of mine didn't go down well with my father. He put ample amount of his time and energy convincing me to be less restless and more resourceful.

Over time, I did become more productive and started taking work allotted to me more seriously. And in hindsight, it became clear to me why my father always gives so much importance to work ethic. My grandparents were farmers and did farming their entire lives. My father too used to assist them while simultaneously earning his degrees. I think no other profession teaches you about work ethic as farming does, especially in India where the odds are so heavily stacked against you. There, hard work doesn't necessarily ensure prosperity but lack of it will necessarily guarantee doom.

Coming back to the present, few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with a few friends about work. The prime question was, should you give your best if you don’t get the job you feel you deserve and you are sure that you have no long term future at the firm you are working for? The context was MBA internships which were going to start few weeks later. Now as you might be aware, the most coveted jobs among MBAs are the Investment Banking and Management Consultancy ones because of the high growth, challenging work and the financial perks which they offer.

Furthermore, in Investment Banking, Goldman Sachs is one of the most coveted employers. Unfortunately, not everyone can get a job there due to high competition and a myriad of other factors. I have observed that there is a lot of disillusionment among those who are not able to get their dream profiles at their dream companies. Many people who don’t see a future at a particular firm choose to just ‘chill’ at their jobs/internships. This reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent editorial from 2008 in the New Yorker titled The Uses of Adversity . Gladwell gives example of Sidney Weinberg to make a point about how adversity played a pivotal role in the lives of the some of the most successful people. Unless you know it already, you must be wondering, ‘Who is Sidney Weinberg?’

Excerpted from the article:

Sidney Weinberg

Sidney Weinberg born in 1891, was one of eleven children of Pincus Weinberg. He left school at fifteen, had scars on his back from knife fights in his preteen days, when he sold evening newspapers at the Hamilton Avenue terminus of the Manhattan-Brooklyn ferry. At sixteen, he made a visit to Wall Street, keeping an eye out for a “nice-looking, tall building,” as he later recalled. He picked 43 Exchange Place, where he started at the top floor and worked his way down, asking at every office, “Want a boy?” By the end of the day, he had reached the third-floor offices of a small brokerage house. There were no openings. He returned to the brokerage house the next morning. He lied that he was told to come back, and bluffed himself into a job assisting the janitor, for three dollars a week. The small brokerage house was Goldman Sachs. Early on, he was asked to carry a flagpole on the trolley uptown to the Sachs family’s town house. The door was opened by Paul Sachs, the grandson of the firm’s founder, and Sachs took a shine to him. Weinberg was soon promoted to the mailroom, which he promptly reorganized. Sachs sent him to Browne’s Business College, in Brooklyn, to learn penmanship. By 1925, the firm had bought him a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. By 1927, he had made partner. By 1930, he was a senior partner, and for the next thirty-nine years — until his death, in 1969 — Weinberg was Goldman Sachs, turning it from a floundering, mid-tier partnership into the premier investment bank in the world.

In the above context, I found the example of Sidney Weinberg quite ironic. Forget about joining the most coveted jobs, he joined a floundering, mid-tier firm as a janitor, probably the ‘lowest’ of the jobs one can find . It would have been difficult to fathom that this janitor would create one of the most profitable firms with one of the most coveted jobs of the 21st century. Sidney Weinberg teaches a thing or two about work ethic. We fall in the trap of getting fixated and infatuated to a set of jobs which are lucrative and valued by people around us and the society in general, but inadvertently fail to give attention to the ‘work’ which they are going to do.

Thankfully for Goldman Sachs, Sidney Weinberg didn't have the luxury to search for the most coveted employer(which definitely wasn't Goldman Sachs at that time). He instead chose to serve the one he had with unmatched work ethic and made himself indispensable to the firm. It worked out well in the end for Goldman Sachs.

What I learnt from Sidney Weinberg is that, in the long run, it’s not “the job” but “the work” which is going to make all the difference. As Mark Twain said, ”It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

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Edit:

Someone posted the blog on reddit and saw a lot of comments. Some people are taking it out of context. For them: I am not telling the poor of the world to work hard. They already do. I am asking the elite and the privileged graduating from the top universities of the world to work hard and earn their place. Unfortunately, people are hell bent on painting is as an elitist ramble.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/334l4e/on_internships_goldman_sachs_and_what_sidney/