Thread by @eervin1

I started my career as a young @MorganStanley financial advisor In 1997. I made a lot of mistakes but I also did a lot of things right. How did I get the job when I had absolutely no qualifications? Time for a thread 🧵 👇

1/ first a little backstory, I wasn’t your typical Ivy League, upper crust @MorganStanley rookie. Quite the opposite in fact, we grew up dirt poor, single mom battling alcoholism while trying to do what she could for my sister and me.

2/ We were pretty good kids I never ever complained about being poor but I have to admit I hated everything about the way kids would make us feel when they saw my mom’s bounced checks pinned up at the grocery store on the bulletin board of shame

3/ and I know how today some of my friends argue about how good the welfare cheese was but I did NOT like it that or the powdered milk. Anyway, I say all that to say that I was pretty determined as a little guy that I was not going to grow up to be poor.

4/ the only problem was that as a kid growing up in that environment I had no idea how learn about money. Shout out to my man @TR401 learntomoney.org

5/ Unfortunately for me growing up in Montana I wasn’t really exposed to wealth, those kids who made fun of me for wearing “plain pocket jeans bought at K-Mart” didn’t realize that their parents could barely afford to buy their kids Levi’s. It was all relative.

6/ so we weren’t surrounded by wealth but we did have TV and I absolutely devoured everything I could about Wall Street because that to me was true wealth. Now, we didn’t have cable but we did have PBS and every Friday night #LouRukeyser would come on for #wallstreetweek

7/ That and the movie Wall Street were my windows into how to get wealth and live the “good life”, or so it seemed at the time. I was only 11 but it stuck with me. At 16 my Dad passed away and left my sister and I some money it wasn’t a fortune in today’s terms ~ $16k

8/ the first thing I did was open up a brokerage account and started buying and trading stocks. My sis wasn’t quite as interested in the long term benefits of saving she was older and liked to party so she blew through her $ quickly.

9/ an opportunity was born. This gave me the oppty to offer her and her friends high interest short term loans. Basically payday loans.

10/ okay so fast forward a bit. After a few years in college for computer Science and Finance I put school on hold to move to San Diego. anyone

11/ Sidebar: I was a pretty smart kid in HS and in Montana, if you are even reasonably smart every teacher will take you aside and beg you to leave as soon as you are able. So, I did as I was told and moved to SD with my soon to be wife.

12/ I was still fairly young and had no experience and obviously no family money but I knew how to work my butt off and I wasn’t afraid to ask, get turned down then ask again. I literally cold called every office of every brokerage office in a 50 mile radius and pitched my story

13/ I said I would work for free for as long as it took to prove myself to them. Finally one guy gave me a shot. He was a manager of one of the smallest offices that Morgan had at the time and he was brand new but he liked people who were scrappy and most importantly, hungry.

14/ he offered me an internship my hours were 8-3pm and I would work for free until one of three things happened, he got tired of me, I got tired of working for free or I proved my value and he would hire me as an official trainee full time.

15/ my fiancé/wife was a brand new school teacher and had plenty to do in the classroom, we only had the one car but I really wanted to impress him so I vowed to myself that I would work “half-days” 6am - 6pm so Debbie would drop me off at 6am and pick me up at 6pm.

16/ Back in those days being an intern basically meant cold calling. Unfortunately I wasn’t blessed with a silver tongue and there were other interns with better backgrounds etc. once again I vowed that I would not be out done if they made 100 calls I would make 300.

17/ and so it went for months 5 days a week 10-13 hours per day 300 calls on average. A few things happened, I got damn good at rejection, at thinking on my feet, and at turning hard work into a series of little games.

18/ I kept track of the numbers like a maniac. I loved improving. The other thing I was pretty good at was being helpful and politely curious around the office.

19/ I think all the more senior brokers liked and appreciated having me around. I was kind and respectful to all the assistants. I was pretty savvy with computers so I was the go to guy to help anyone when they had a problem, more than anything I think it was just the fact that I

20/ never gave up and I always had a smile no matter how “crappy” the request was, I genuinely wanted to be helpful and I was grateful for the opportunity to learn.

21/ Finally the day came when the manager came around to ask me if I wanted a full time job at Morgan Stanley. It was probably about 4 months into it I had never asked him once. He warned me though, I wold hve to apply like all the other trainees I wouldn’t get special treatment

22/ he was a new manager so he wasn’t going to stick his neck out for a rookie with no college degree and no family 💰. I would have to take a series of tests math and finance written tests and a psychological exam.

23/ the math and finance test I smoked. Fortunately math came fairly easy to me and I’d been following the markets since I was 12. But a Psych test??? WTF. it was a 3 hr exam where I would act as a financial advisor in dif scenarios and a psychologist would be the client/prospect

24/ thank goodness I’d done nothing but practice at the school of hard knocks for the past 4 months. I think I got the highest score they had ever seen from a new recruit because of all of those countless hours of cold calling.

25/ the moral? don’t ever think someone or something is better than you. Don’t ever think that you don’t belong anywhere you want to be. Be humble though you HAVE TO EARN RESPECT it should not be a chip on your shoulder. I hope this was helpful to someone.