Career Choices of Wealthy Men

 by Elliott R. Morss

 Preface

The original idea for this book resulted from reading essays written by Williams College alumni for their 25th reunion. I became fascinated with what people with financial independence did with their lives. My initial hypothesis was that freed from the need to “put bread on the table”, they would engage in interesting and socially useful activities.

 Reading the essays led me to reflect on my own life and the choices I made. I decided to interview men who knew at an early age they had enough wealth and the consequent freedom to make whatever life choices appealed to them.  I ended up interviewing 20 men (I only interviewed men because the social pressures on women now 60 were totally different. I make no claims for the representativeness of the sample) at least 60 years old living in the Boston – Washington DC area. They were intense interviews, lasting between 2.5 and 3 hours. The men were very interested in talking about their life choices. An outline of the proposed book follows.

 Introduction

When you have more than half your life behind you, you often feel you have wasted your time on pursuits and ambitions of no actual value, while neglecting to do the things toward which your nature was truly inclined. (Isak Dinesen, The Angelic Avengers, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1946, p. 43)

 Financially independent individuals have the opportunity to lead more varied and interesting lives than the vast majority of mankind whose lives center primarily on maintaining and enhancing their economic well-being.

 Have the financially independent taken advantage of this good fortune? Are they happier because earning income is not such an indispensable necessity? Have they lived more varied, interesting and praiseworthy lives?

 How do the independently wealthy feel about the career choices they have made? With hindsight of experience and the confidence of maturity, would they have select greater adventures or challenges if they had a chance to do it all over again?

 These are some of the questions I explored through interviews with wealthy men. The findings of these interviews are set forth in the following chapters.

 The book also presents two other findings discovered during my investigations.  The first is that when it comes to making career decisions, there appear to be four personality types that dominate at every socioeconomic level. The second is there are useful lessons about the process of career choice for college students and people just starting their careers to be drawn from the choices made by men interviewed for this book.

 Chapter I – A Personal Account

My own “interview”.

Chapter II – A Review of Writings on the Wealthy and Their Career Choices

To set the stage for what this book will and will not do, writings on the wealthy and their career choices will be presented. At least four types of writings will be discussed:

• Writings that emphasize the flashy and decadent (People Magazine, W Magazine, Vanity Fair    Magazine, Lapham, Money and Class in America, Stephen Birmingham);
• Writings that portray the problems and pressures facing the rich somewhat more sympathetically (W. Somerset Maugham, Jane Austen, J.P. Marquand, John O’Hara, Louis Auchincloss, J.D. Salinger);
• Writings about the power of the Eastern Establishment (Edward Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Class in America, Kai Bird, The Chairman, John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment, Clare Brandt, An American Aristocracy: The Livingstons, Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made);
• Writings on career choices (Daniel J. Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Christopher Mogil and Anne Slepian, We Gave It All Away, Gail Sheehy, Passages, and Fydor Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor Parable” in The Brothers Karamazov).

Chapter III – Early Influences

This chapter will portray influences from family, schools, the military, and the political environment on career choices. Individuals interviewed will be designated by code, e.g, “QT”.

1. Vague Parental Pressure to Do Well While Not Embarrassing the Family by Trying Too Hard or Failing

 QT: “A sense of appropriateness which overpowers anything else.” “We are limited by experiences, etc. But given these limitations, I would have done it totally differently. I would have developed more of myself somewhat earlier in life in terms of what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. I have come to where I am in life through a series of compromises driven by necessity.”

QT: “Yankees are not successful because they kill their own, especially the talented ones. God forbid you are creative.”

 KX: “During the tennis time I was undergoing an awful internal battle – a lot of this is New England Puritanism – as to why I was trying to be an athlete where from my schooling background and everything I should have been getting into business. It was definitely affecting how I was playing tennis. And in France, I decided to commit suicide. I stayed out one whole night in France trying to get the courage up to jump out a window. Finally, with the morning light, I decided this was stupid and I needed help.”

 DT: “Dad’s approach was you did well and he assumed that you would do well at what you do. He wouldn’t tell you to do well; you sort of knew you should. I do remember shortly after I got my license, I asked to borrow a car. Dad had a 1953 Corvette, which he coveted and still has. And I sure as hell didn’t ask to borrow that car. Yet that’s what he gave me. It was almost as if this burden of responsibility was to control my youthful desires. The very fact that he gave it to me without a word of caution was Dad’s way of saying you are innocent until proven guilty.”

KX: “With Dad there was a feeling of things that I was expected to do which were not really defined. It is not that he said to me this is what you should be doing with your life; this is what I expect out of you. But I know he had expectations.”

QT: “In early days, typical of most people like me, I was fulfilling other peoples’ (his mother’s) ambitions.”

 TC: “I had a strong sense of duty and obligation to my parents and one doesn’t disappoint one’s parents. Why should I be involved in the cacamammey business of vacuum cleaners? I was shackled to a family business that interested me very little. It was dull, the people uninteresting, the job pedestrian. I never had a friend who was a vacuum cleaner salesman. As I grew up, my interests grew, my horizons broadened.”

 2. Traumatic Events

 QC: sister suicide.

 QT: brother suicide.

 QT: getting thrown out of Harvard for fighting with college police after getting drunk: “the next morning, before going to see dean of students to get expelled, I vowed to stop drinking for a year and has never had an alcoholic drink since.”

 XN: adopted, gang raped in college, “My sister had two attempts at suicide. I never had the will or ways to get out.” “I have been crippled most of my life, that is very pertinent.” … None of us would have chosen our parents, or very few of us would most of the time. This is particularly true with adoptive parents.”

 TC: argument with father; getting fired, realizing nobody needed him.

 KX: mother died of cancer when he was 15: “I still suffer from thinking that to a degree, I must have done something that caused my mother to die. …somehow my pulling away from my parents caused my mother to die”.

 DN: “I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to do. Here I was without a job and we had two children. It was a sinking feeling. I was less and less confident at job interviews. I was feeling at the end of my rope and wondering what I should do. Should I go back to the family firm with my tail dragging between my legs, and asked to be rehired? It was a desperate period I have never experienced before or since.”

 3. The Military Experience

 DN: “Stultifying.”

 DS: “Good: I met a class of people I would not otherwise have met.”

 KJ: “Good: as a lawyer, I wished I could have been at the Nuremberg trials.”

 HM: “I got time off to sail.”

 LQ: “Simply extraordinary and philosophical. I had led a very cloistered life of social and economic privilege. We were not extraordinary wealthy, but we did all the polite things. Two things happened. For the first time I met GIs and sailors and realized they had values and that got rid of a huge amount of snobbism I had. The second thing I realized, after being involved with submarine warfare, etc.) I realized that I could probably do anything I wanted with the rest of my life. That had a profound affect on me”.

 DT: “I spent three years in Japan (in Navy) and found the experience much more difficult than Harvard, but they were tremendously enriching years. First, I was on a minesweeper and later became a communication officer. I have stated ever since that it was probably the most important three years of my life.”

 DX: “When I arrived in Italy, I put in to be a liaison officer to France (Mother had spent a few years in France and I spoke French). I went to Paris for a couple of months. Later, when I went to Germany, the Army was sending people to Sorbonne for education, and I arranged to be sent. I again was in Paris. I was always a terrible student but an avid reader, and these two trips to Paris were very important in molding my interests.”

 4. Dealing with Money

QC: “Both parents expected their children to do something: to work full-time, whether we contributed or not. Father was a banker and felt finance was quite dirty – any expression of an interest in making money would not have gone over very big. Mother was a lawyer who worked on civil liberties cases and spent a lifetime standing up for what is right. Being on the board of a nonprofit or major philanthropic institution was considered important by both parents as was giving money to appropriate organizations.”

 SC: “It was not something that one discussed. It was there. I remember my mother telling me repeatedly you don’t have to worry; you will never have to work if you don’t want to. You are all set, so don’t worry about it.”

 MQ: “My family was isolated, art oriented, and not worldly. I was never exposed to businessmen or standard career people. The family never talked about money. There were odd awkward moments when a trust officer came in and he had to have us sign something. I had to fight to come to grips with the real world.”

DX: “Because my step-grandfather held the purse strings so tightly, I got no sense of the value of money. Instead, I learned how to manipulate them for money.”

Observations on DX by an acquaintance: “DX would not come out on top of his class in academia, but with a little luck and persistence he might have landed a full professorship at Harvard. What kept DX from persisting on anything for an extended period of time were his social interests. He could write well; with persistence, he could have been a social commentator like Tom Wolfe. But DX would get greater pleasure out of writing and putting on a skit at the Tavern Club than anything else.”

5. The Kennedy Era

Elliott: “Part of my sense of obligation stems from memories of the Kennedy years. I have found that it is impossible to get people who were not caught up in those times to understand the feeling I have for those years. But I have met enough people who remember those years as I do to know my feelings are not one of a kind. Like many of my generation, I have never gotten over his death and the resulting sense of loss. I remember hearing about it just after teaching a class at the University of Michigan. I went back into the deserted classroom and looked out a window without moving for about thirty minutes. It was a gray, cold day in Ann Arbor, and I realized that something very important for me had ended. What I thankfully did not realize at that time was how important the image and excitement of the Kennedy era was to me. I have never recovered from that loss. I spent twenty years in Washington looking for a way to sustain that feeling of hope, purpose, and excitement. I remember how the Kennedy image captured the rest of the world: wherever I traveled for the IMF, there were streets named after Kennedy and people would seek out Americans for advice because the Kennedy image symbolized so much excitement and hope.”

 Chapter IV – The Random Element in Life Choices

 Throughout the interviews, there was a sense that timing and luck played an important role in determining life paths.

LQ: “The strange thing about the entire pattern of my life is that opportunities arose throughout my career without any premeditation or planning. They either came at the wrong time or the right time. Timing is not yours, it is somebody else’s and you can’t control it. I have always found this a kind of wondrous, curious thing.”

DT: “I always thought I wanted to be an architect or a journalist and came back from that experience still undecided.”

DT had applied to MIT, Harvard and Yale and was admitted to two of them and “put the down payment at Yale.” In that interim period DT was still interviewing without a clear preference between the two fields.

“Then I was offered a job at a major national magazine. And in just one night I said screw it, I would really rather get working than spend three more years in school and another three years as a draftsman. The only significant thing I would say in that year is that I took a two-day test – the idea was to help me decide what I wanted to do. The very interesting thing about it was they measured the highest aptitudes that any individual has, the thesis being you will only be fulfilled in later life if you are in a career path that realizes most of your high aptitudes. The test findings were that I would be most satisfied in the fields of journalism, architecture, education (as a university president type thing), or the Foreign Service. The test results were quite reinforcing inasmuch as those were the four fields I had been thinking of.”

DT: “The day before my interview to determine my first duty station in OCS,…we had a hockey game (I had helped to organize an OCS hockey team just as a way to get off the base) at St. George’s against some other team. A fellow I had played some hockey with in college was on the OCS team. After the game he asked me what site for OCS was I planning to request. I had been thinking Norfolk, Virginia. He suggested Japan. That night I went back and read up on Japan in an encyclopedia. In my interview the next day, I picked Japan and it has changed my whole life.”

 XU: “After I graduated in June 1948, I went home and sat around all summer. In those days parents, however loving, were much less tolerant of post-college self-indulgence. After about six weeks, my mother let me know, in a very nice way, that it was time I did something. So about the middle of August she asked me what are you going to do. My mother suggested law school. I responded that I had no idea of going to law school and Harvard admissions were closed. My mother suggested Boston University. Within 24 hours, I was on my way to New York City to take the aptitude test for admittance to law school. It lasted two days and took place in an un-air-conditioned classroom at Columbia University with the temperature about 96F. I did acceptably, and that is how my legal career started. I always look back on that because I had no great desire to go to law school. If I were doing it all over again I don’t know if I would. It shows on what a casual basis a long, long and quite happy career can be formed with no serious thinking or planning at all.”

 KX: “In the spring of 1980, a man who owned a company engaged in activities that really interested me (baseball statistics) asked if I could prepay a bill because he had to go into the hospital. Just on a whim, I wrote him back wishing him a speedy recovery but adding that if his health problems were causing him to think about selling the firm, I would be interested in talking to him. Lo and behold, I got a long typewritten letter back. Yes, he really did feel his health was going to force him to get out of the business: it was something he had done himself for over 50 years. My company ended up buying his firm (which didn’t have anything to do with our primary line of business). But interestingly, we later sold his business off at a considerable profit, and that profit allowed my firm (shipping brokerage) to survive for a few more years.”

 Chapter V – Regrets

A number of people expressed serious regrets over how they spent their lives.

 QC: Suicide of his sister led directly to QC giving up music and going to medical school. “I went to medical school to make amends. Music became poisoned. When I practiced it was the only time I was yelled at by my sister. And if my sister was upset it was life threatening.”

 TC: Question: “Do you wish you had done something different?”

 ”Of course, my talents lay in other areas – not money, not mechanical things. The longer you live you discover things about yourself.” Question: “Such as?”

 ”Oh yes, I sold myself or accepted an ordained role in family business rather than proceeding in areas where I had latent interests. I submitted to simple acceptance of what was expected of me. I married, had a child and obligations and couldn’t see any way out. I followed the prescribed course. I never had formal training to make it possible to develop the skills and talents that might have satisfied me more as a mature person.”

 SC: “I have lots of regrets that I couldn’t make up my mind early enough on. The people that were more single minded than I were much more successful.”

 Question: “But you were single minded, you focused on the medical field. Where would you have done it differently?”

 SC: “I had blinders on. I didn’t read the handwriting well. I focused on the wrong thing and also somewhat compulsive in the way I pursued it. That is a very deep and important question for me, why I pursued it in light of all evidence that would suggest that I had little ability or interest. I don’t know why that is the case. It would not have been an impossible situation to entertain other careers. Certainly, my parents would not have raised the roof if I had said that I wanted to be an aviator or something. They might have expressed disappointment that I was not going to have an MD after my name. But they wouldn’t have disinherited me or anything like that.”

 QT: “We are limited by experiences, etc. But given these limitations, I would have done it totally differently. I would have developed more of myself somewhat earlier in life in terms of what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. I have come to where I am in life through a series of compromises driven by necessity. I enjoy myself, life is an interesting set of challenges: I am irritable but not depressed. I think I am a person who understands tangible things quite well, but my life is a mass of intangibles. I’m good at details, have a good memory, would have been good in an antique or art business. But these are vulgar businesses, not things you would have done. Nobody in my family could have steered/advised me well: they were either dead with drink or engaged in traditional activities such as law or business.”

DS: “I feel a little embarrassed about my wealth. I like cashing a paycheck. I can’t take any credit for inheritance, while a retirement check will really be mine; I earned that.”

MQ: “If I were growing up now I wouldn’t feel as impelled to work so hard. Living well, in a big house always embarrassed me. In the army I concealed my background, it was liberating, helpful. I was independent.”

DX: “I never applied for a grant because I didn’t feel right about depriving someone else who needed the money. I have heard it said that if I had not had money, I could have been a first-rate scholar.”

TG: “A friend of mine in California told me to stay there in real estate and in 10 years you will have as much money as you need to do anything you want. It was probably good advice. But I am not sure that is what I would have wanted. Money buys you choice and power to bring about change. I didn’t have the wisdom in the 60s to say one would be more effective to build a base than to chase causes.”

Chapter VI – Career Choice Personality Types

 It appears that career decisions depend importantly on the personalities of those making the decisions. It also appears that the same personality types appear at all socioeconomic levels. There are four basic personality types at work in making career choices. These types exist at all levels of the socioeconomic strata, and they are not mutually exclusive.

 i. Risk-Avoider

The primary objective of the risk-avoider is to find a safe career path to avoid any danger of failure. The risk avoider will often settle for work that is far below what he is capable of doing.

 DS: In commenting on why he chose to be a school teacher, he said: “I was a sheep following the path of least resistance.”

 Question: “Did you think of any other college at that time?”

 XU: “None whatsoever, I didn’t give a thought to a single other college. I think I was singularly unimaginative about the whole process, but that is what distinguished my generation from the later ones. We just followed a routine. We were very staid, very conventional. Most of us wouldn’t think of kicking over the traces and doing something completely unexpected because that would have rippled the water too much in our families.

 ii. Advantage-Taker

This person takes full advantage of his family’s socioeconomic situation and network: if he lives in a small town, he might become the mayor or bank President; if he is from a wealthy family living in a big city environment, he will end up in top management of a leading financial institution. The distinguishing point about this person is that he takes advantage of the connections his family can offer him.

 iii. Risk-Taker

Not happy working within constraints and advantages offered by his family’s socioeconomic situation and network. He needs to “escape” and make it on his own. There are two types of risk-takers. Type A: Once Type A has settled into his own niche, he will stay there and might return to his family. Type B never settles into anything for an extended period of time. He does something and maybe quite well, but then moves on to something else.

 XN: In discussing why he started working in a high risk area: “This was purely for psychological reasons: getting to understand myself a bit as to why I am such a loose screw, a one-man band, not a team player. On the other hand, if you think of it, I have been a team player: put me in a bureaucracy and I can be very well behaved.”

XN: About 10 or 11 years ago XN started working with cancer patients. He now works with AIDS patients. “Maybe what I am doing is part of supporting a life (people?) Like myself. … I never in my whole life felt terribly supported, within institutions. I always supported the institution. It was an upside down relationship. Parenting with parents, it was the same thing.”

DT: Talking about leaving a secure and successful position to start up a highly risky venture: “Most of my peers thought I was out of my gourd – what in the Christ are you doing? A lot of people talked to me and I was quite flattered for a while. I thought they were really interested in me and my motivations. In fact, I realized later they were asking questions of themselves. How have you had the guts, you know…I am still asked the same question constantly. What I felt at the time was that in the job I left, I was on a very gilded track and I had been treated very well. However, no matter how good or bad a job I did, I was not going to make more than 5% difference in that post relative to someone else they could get to do the job. Consciously, I was thinking if I have a chance to put my own individual stamp on the new company, I could make a big difference. Also, I had done the same thing on a smaller scale when I was 13 years old so it was not an entirely new field to me.”

 iv. Loser

Can be from any of the three above groups. But in the case of the loser, it can be anticipated that nothing will work. This type has a will to fail and does.

 TC was 46 years old in 1974, divorced with grown kids and unemployed. There had been a great deal of turmoil in the last several years what with the divorce, and the breaking up of the business relationship. “I was flat on my ass emotionally. It was time to take stock and determine what I want to do.” He decided to take six months to think about things. It was a time when “nobody needed anything from me.” He asked, “Who else needs to be satisfied from me or my life than myself. The answer was nobody. So I decided to read and think about things. I stayed interested in friends, invested, passed the time of day with grandchildren and being available for someone that needed me. This I have been doing ever since.”

 Chapter VII – Advice for Parents in Dealings with Career Choices of Children

                           and Young People Just Starting Careers

 Times have changed dramatically for persons starting out in life relative to what it was like when our interviewees were choosing schools and colleges. Competition is much stiffer and both sexes are career-oriented. The book will contain some useful information for young people and their parents about career choices. In part, this is because the growth in family incomes over the years means there is a large number of children whose parents can afford to support them while they do extensive explorations of alternative careers.Question: “Is there a way to guide people?”

TG: “Maybe each person has to travel his own road. I like a person to stand, believe in something. To take risks in whatever, job, another person, climb a mountain. The important thing is to take an interest and pursue with energy and commitment to make a difference. It is not appropriate for another person to say what that interest should be. I would like my children to have that choice. They will need to be more practical than me. Choice creates a confusion or complexity of life that can be dysfunctional and distracting and nibbling at too many things. Those are the problems of people with money. It throws you into a quandary if someone says you can do anything you want to without fear of harming your financial base. That is very complicated.”

DS: “Do something you like. Do something that has a payoff for others, but don’t do something for others – there are no rewards in doing something for someone else only.”

Elliott: “Every child during college should be required to read “The Grand Inquisitor Parable” in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky and then write an essay on what type of person they think they are. Children are now under tremendous parental pressure to do well in school so they can go to good colleges. I think it is significant that only one person interviewed had a clear idea while in college of what they wanted to do when they got out of college. I think that children as they enter college should be told exactly how much money they can expect and when from their parents. During the college years, parents should start talking in considerable detail with their children about their career plans. Parents should take pains to avoid being directive but instead try to insure that the children are thinking somewhat logically and have access to good information on career alternatives. For some children, these discussions won’t be productive because of past parent/child relationships. In such cases, the parents should help find other persons to hold such discussions with their kids. I think schools and colleges should put far more resources into career counseling than they now do. I think students in the senior year of high school and the junior year of college should be required to take short courses on alternative career paths, money management, and interpersonal dynamics.”