Corporate America is Killing Your Soul
Because everything you were told is a lie
I never had a reason to disbelieve in “the system” until I was 22 years old. I suppose busting my ass and getting a baseball scholarship to Vanderbilt blinded me to the some realities of the world.
I was an economics major at an elite conservative university and graduated with honors. I believed hard work and merit were rewarded, because for the most part, in my life they had been. It wasn’t until the year I retired from my lackluster professional baseball career that I realized the corporate world was not set up like a track & field event. You see, even though young adults are told that companies like hiring athletes, if you were actually a good enough athlete to get drafted by a professional team, you’d realize companies didn’t really like hiring athletes.
Because my first professional experience read “Professional Baseball Player, Colorado Rockies,” few banks saw value in offering me an analyst position. I was not allowed to be involved with campus interviews, because I was 16 months removed from graduation. I really felt boxed out of the pipeline that all my non-athlete peers were a part of.
I felt isolated and left out at a time in my life when all I wanted to do was fit in. I was successful in ways very few people were, and I was punished for it.
Fortunately, in the course of my first job search, I befriended a big financial supporter to the Vanderbilt baseball program. Turns out, he ran a hedge fund and liked the way I thought. After speaking to him for hours on Skype, I came to learn that he was a huge conspiracy theorist. But he was also the richest self made person I had ever met at the time, worth over one hundred million dollars.
If he thought weird things, he still attained the financial success I dreamed of, so I was humble enough to entertain the possibility that he was onto something. He came to offer me a job and flew me around the world on private jets when I was 23.
He taught me about private central banking. He was the one who taught me about the intersection between corporate and government power. And ultimately, he was the reason I believed it would rain money in Silicon Valley, inspiring my decision to move there in 2011 and seek employment at Google.
Getting a job offer from Google was harder than I imagined. After they ignored my online applications for weeks, I told myself all I needed to do was get invited on campus, wear a custom tailored suit, and talk my way into a sales job. Sounds crazy right? Well that’s exactly what happened. After about 90 seconds of smooth talk, I was basically in. My hiring manager told me as much during my formal interview the following week.
After accepting my offer, I thought I was in the clear. I was an employee for the most sought after employer in the world at the time. I thought I had it all figured out.
But despite having more life experience than most of my peers and managers at Google, I was still insecure. I still felt the need to fit in. Even though I had been a successful athlete, I hadn’t really succeeded in the business world. All I wanted to do was to succeed, because that’s all I had done my entire life. Success was my identity, and as I came to find out, was also the identity of many of my Google peers.