Quiet anniversary

I was at Bible study this week discussing adulthood when someone asked “at what point in your life did you feel you’ve become an adult.”

 

After thinking about the topic for a moment I said “June 5, 1998.” I went on to explain that it was a significant day in my life because on that day I moved into my own apartment for the very first time after graduating from college weeks before. It was my first day of no longer living with my parents or on UVA property. I had traded the protection of my parents and a daily class schedule for electric bills, tax withholding, and having to go to work everyday.

 

Here we are ten years later. It’s been a decade of surprises, disappointments, things I learned that I want to share with the world, as well as things I have done that I’d rather not tell anyone about.

 

Tomorrow I will be returning to UVA for my ten year college reunion.

The importance of wealth management

I wish to preface my comments by saying that I wish Ed McMahon the best of luck in dealing with his health and financial predicaments. When I was kid, my family used to watch Star Search and I remember watching the show even before I understood what it was about. I certainly do not want to see this 85 year old beloved icon of American entertainment lose his home to foreclosure.

 

But the story that surfaced today about his financial dilemma illustrates just how little even affluent Americans know about prudent wealth management. According to Wikipedia, McMahon had a net worth of more than $200 million in the 1990s. Over the next decade, divorce settlements, declining real estate value, and a career-stalling neck injury put him in a situation where he currently owes $644,000 in mortgage payments.

 

Everywhere around us is evidence that the wealthiest nation in the world has somehow produced a population which is incapable of wealth management. I think this is partly due to a culture where we push everything to the extreme. When I was in business school we had a class visit from two alums who started a successful email marketing company in Durham. The duo explained that company cash flow was so tight in the beginning that the two did not get paid for the first year. When a student asked how they survived an entire year without a salary, one explained that it was the result of having purposely made financial decisions to live below his means. He said we could graduate from business school and choose to either use our MBA salaries to live a lavish lifestyle or be frugal and create further lifestyle and business opportunities along the way.

 

With the recent economic problems in the country, one of the most important thing Americans can do during this time is the virtue of saving for a rainy day.

Fox announces Season 7 of 24, for real this time

You all remember 24, don’t you? The show I used to blog about? As I prepared to relay the latest news regarding my favorite show, it dawned on me that the wait for season seven has become a drama in it of itself.

Back in October, Fox released an internet preview for the new season with an announcement from Keifer Sutherland promising “the biggest season yet.” That season was scraped due to the writers strike. Now Fox is announcing that the next season will premier in January and will be accompanied with a two hour movie in November.

“Producers also dished on the two-hour, stand-alone '24' prequel movie which aims to bridge the gap between the end of season six and the start of season seven. Shot partly on location in South Africa, the movie will take place on Inauguration Day for the next U.S. president as Jack Bauer finds himself in the middle of an international crisis.”

The rest of the article mentions that the writers used the extra time to fine tune the story line and for the first time, mapped out the entire story before shooting took place. Unfortunately they decided to go ahead with the storyline of Jack Bauer being court marshaled for crimes he allegedly committed while fighting terrorists. And Keifer Sutherland is once again promising “the best season of 24.”

After the tortuous wait fans have endured, I hope for Sutherland’s sake that he delivers and this is the best season ever. Otherwise, there would be justified reasons to have him court marshaled.

Changing lanes with Sydney Pollack

I am going to confess that I had no idea who Sydney Pollack was. When I heard yesterday that he died, I initially had him confused with Sidney Poitier. Even after I saw his picture and recognized him from several movies, I still had no idea he was the director responsible for some of the most memorable films in the past thirty years.

 

My ignorance is surprising given that Pollack played a major character in a movie that very accurately illustrates the moral compromises we often make in the business world. In Changing Lanes he played a partner in a law firm where Ben Affleck’s character was an associate. The plot involves him trying to convince Affleck’s character (who was also his son in law) to forge a signature on a court document. He enlisted the help of his daughter who told Affleck’s character (paraphrasing) the following:

 

“At the level of the law that you’re dealing with, your goal is not the pursuit of truth or justice but to manipulate the system to get the desired outcome.”

 

This makes me think about all the times I have been in a conversation where the primary goal of what I was saying was not to convey the truth but to either positively portray myself and/or to get my listener to do something I wanted. And I am not alone in having done this. In business school, I found the culture to be such that people were constantly “selling themselves” by talking about themselves in the best way possible. While I realize the needs to “sell yourself”, I sometimes wonder if we lose a part of ourselves in the process. Once a friend told me that her friend was at a Duke MBA happy hour and later described the Fuqua students as “emotionally shallow.” There was another time when I was at He’s Not Here talking to some grad students and when I mentioned I was in business school, one girl sarcastically said(paraphrasing) “oh we know about all you MBA types.” She needed no further explanation as to what she meant by “MBA types.”

 

The most memorable point in the movie came toward the end when Ben Affleck’s character confronted his boss and asked him “how can you live like that?” Pollack’s character masterfully replied:

 

“I can live with myself because at the end of the day I think I do more good than harm. What other standards have I got to judge by?” 

 

Unfortunately the moral logic of the above statement is not limited in today’s world to lawyers and us “MBA types.”

Yet another error in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is an excellent source of information on the business and political worlds. But I am getting sick and tired of the errors on this publication, both in the print version and the internet edition.

I have trouble believing that someone who has never taken a journalism class and with no formal training in writing other than the required classes in college and in business school can spot these errors right away and the staff of the Journal cannot. Either the paper should hire a proofreader, ask its editors to be more aggressive in spotting errors, or put in place a process where anyone from the paper’s summer intern to the average reader can point out these errors to the

The Journal markets its print subscription and internet site access as a bundled product. Since my subscription expires soon, I have embarked on a strategy to keep reading the paper in perpetuity. I have gone onto the web site and suspended home delivery of the paper product until 2014. Between now and then, each day will not count against the number of days remaining on my subscription. Meanwhile, I can continue to read each day’s paper (US, European, and Asian versions) on the internet site.

Since I have been so diligent about pointing out the paper’s faults and errors on this blog, getting to read it for free is the least the Wall Street Journal can do for me.

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The controversial ingredients of happiness

Monday’s Wall Street Journal had a book review of Gross National Happiness by Arthur C. Brooks. Over the past three years I have thought much about what exactly makes one happy. From my personal experience, I can tell the source of much of my happiness has to do with finding a meaningful community, making a connection to members of such a community, and also disconnecting from some of the things that the more secular elements of my life claim to be important.

 

“In “Gross National Happiness,” Mr. Brooks has assembled an array of statistics to measure the mood of America's citizens and to discover the reasons they feel as they do. Most often he cites polls that ask for self-described happiness levels, matching up the answers with various beliefs, habits, life choices or experiences.”

 

One of the more controversial claims in the book is that people with certain political affiliations are happier than others.

 

“At the end of the day, Mr. Brooks notes, "political conservatives take the happiness prize hands down." Those who identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, he says, are twice as likely to say that they're very happy as those who identify themselves as liberal or very liberal. What explains the rightists' relative bliss? It seems that a conservative political disposition exists alongside other happy habits of being.”

 

I agree with this. About a month ago I was entertaining myself by using the North Carolina State Board of Elections web site to lookup the voter registration records of some of my business school professors. In North Carolina, one can register as either Republican, Democrat, or as unaffiliated. With the exception of the ones who were registered as unaffiliated, I correctly guessed the political party affiliation of each and every professor that I took a guess on.

 

It’s difficult to describe the qualitative metrics that I used to estimate the political preferences of the professors. But I do remember that one professor struck me as a strong Republican because of his ability to tell self-deprecating jokes about himself. Everything else about his mannerisms conveyed that he was very happy about his life, his profession, and where he was in life. In contrast, I correctly guessed that another professor was a Democrat based on his classroom demeanor which conveyed that he did not want to be there.

 

The author wrote something else which is also quite applicable.

 

“In an observation of particular relevance at the moment, Mr. Brooks says that political "extremists" – who comprise 10% to 20% of the population – may be among the happiest people in America, because they "believe with perfect certainty in the correctness of their political dogmas."”

 

Perhaps this explains why I am so happy.

Looking back and planning ahead

One year ago tomorrow I graduated from business school with my MBA. The past twelve months have been both challenging and disappointing. When I started this blog almost three years ago I was in the process of preparing for business school. While I had concerns about whether UNC (or even going to business school in general) was the right choice for me, never in my wildest dreams would I have expected my job search to last almost an entire school year.

 

In some ways I feel as though I spent three years in business school. The first two going to class and last one looking for a job while reflecting on my MBA experience. Over the past three years the words “A place for me to share my thoughts and hopes as I go through the MBA program at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School” have served as an appropriate description for this blog. However, going forward the blog will be less focused on business school and more focused on other aspects of my life.

 

Over the next couple of days I will be rebranding the blog to more accurately reflect the topics I will be blogging about. While I haven’t finalized on what the new blog description will be,  I imagine it will revolve around my life as a young professional the Chapel Hill and will cover the myriad of topics I am interested ranging from technology, politics, my Christian faith, all the way to the latest rumors on the internets.

 

Stay tuned!