A pivotal moment happened in my career when I had a particularly stressful month while on a roadshow to South Africa. I still remember it (and always will) as Red October. A big part of being client facing in the investment world is managing expectations. As a contrarian investor, there are regularly periods of (sustained) underperformance where the price disconnects from a deeply considered view of the value of the underlying businesses. My job was to explain to clients and advisers who were under pressure what we were doing with their money.
One of the colleagues I was with also found it tough... and both of us “headed for the mountains” in different ways. He left shortly afterwards for a year and a half course, that trains you to be dropped anywhere in the world and make it out alive! I just booked a month-long yoga teacher training course I had had my eye on. Taking a whole month of leave seemed unfathomable, but it was over the new year, and my sanity had been pushed to an extreme where I needed this carrot to put one foot in front of the other. Fortunately, I was at the stage of my career where I could approve my own leave. Probably because they trusted me not to give myself four weeks, but a good friend reminded me that “sometimes it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission”.
I also started renting a lock-and-go art studio at Wimbledon Art Studios. When I started work, I had justified my career choice by saying “it is easier to make money from maths and do art as a hobby than the other way around”... but work can be a time vacuum, and I hadn’t painted in a few years. I felt like I was losing myself and getting sucked into the anxiety of work. 2011 became my “year of the mojo” to reclaim my spark.
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